Netflix doesn’t have a universal library – it hosts different content in different countries – so pretending to be in, say, the United Kingdom, would give users access to a huge amount of content that would otherwise be off-limits.
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You, a Netflix user, will be limited to whatever Netflix offers inside your country’s borders. People are going out of their way, often paying for a VPN service and a Netflix account, to legitimately watch the content they love’.
Still, if you’ve been using a Netflix VPN, now might be a good time to catch up on whatever show you’re watching.
“If all of our content were globally available, there wouldn’t be a reason for members to use proxies or unblockers”, David Fullagar, Netflix’s vice president of content delivery architecture, wrote in a blog.
Netflix announced the addition of 130 new countries to its world service map at CES 2016, including places like Russia, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.
‘For now, given the historic practice of licensing content by geographic territories, the TV shows and movies we offer differ, to varying degrees, by territory’.
To address unblockers, Netflix uses “the same or similar measures other firms do”.
“This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in the coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will be able to access only the service in the country where they now are”.
This frustration is driving people to circumvent geographical restrictions by using VPNs and proxy services.
“The strategy is simple – they have a responsibility to content owners to only show that content in the geographies for which they have a license”.
The announcement follows the same path that another American streaming service, Hulu, enforced two years ago when it also cut access to proxy services.
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The new change could be particularly rough on users traveling overseas, but who want to access the content for which they pay a monthly fee. “Then we can work on the more important part which is piracy”, Hastings said. Netflix has been somewhat slow in putting the restrictions into place, drawing the ire of companies like Sony.
