Netflix decides to expand its terrotries and fight VPN piracy!
Netflix is probably the largest and most popular hub for on-demand online television and video streaming service with over 57 million subscribers (20 million subscribers in China alone) in about 50 countries across the world. You can watch countless movies, documentaries and TV shows, including Netflix Originals, on Netflix with no commercials or interruptions. All you need is an internet connection, data and a compatible device, such as: laptop, desktop, mountaintop, smart TV, tablets, smartphones, Xbox and wii.
However, you can’t really watch all the best content that Netflix offers, unless your located in the US.What’s even worse is that Netflix is completely blocked in some countries, like: Australia, Oman, Dubai, Kuwait, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc, and will not work if users from those countries and others try to access it from outside the U.S. For that reason, millions of internet users bypass Netflix’s geo-restriction policies and access the juggernaut media library using virtual private networks (VPNs). Although you might be living thousands of miles away, a VPN hides your original IP address and replaces it with another that has access to this kind of blocked web content. As a result, you will be able to trick websites like Netflix by appearing to be coming from a local IP address and will be given instant access.
Because the US version of Netflix is the most popular among media addicts, but geographical licensing agreements with movie studios and TV companies make it difficult for other viewers in other countries to have access to the same amount of content that the US enjoys, Netflix US is being accessed on regular basis by millions of users from other countries, especially Australia, through VPNs. As a result, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has come up with the best solution for this problem to help people from different parts of the world to access the service legally – globalize Netflix.
“The VPN scenario is someone who wants to pay and can’t quite pay. The basic solution is for Netflix to get global and have its content be the same all around the world so there’s no incentive to [use a VPN to circumvent international restrictions],” Hastings said. “Then we can work on the more important part which is piracy. The key thing about piracy is that some fraction of it is because [users] couldn’t get the content. That part we can fix. Some part of piracy however is because they just don’t want to pay. That’s a harder part. As an industry, we need to fix global content.”
Australia is currently one of the biggest Netflix piracy nations with around 200,000 users in the country accessing Netflix US via VPNs.
“The VPN thing is a small little asterisk compared to piracy. Piracy is really the problem around the world,” said Hastings.
The good news is that Netflix is launching a service for Australia next week, which will hopefully reduce the number of illegal access to the giant media streaming library.
