Netflix cracking down on VPNs

‘We are making progress in licensing content across the world and, as of last week, now offer the Netflix service in 190 countries, but we have a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere, ‘ he wrote.

Dan Clarke, 28, founder and CEO of consultancy firm Disruptient, has been accessing Netflix with a VPN in Dubai, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, to get United States and British content.

As part of Netflix’s global expansion, the streaming giant will step up its efforts to prevent subscribers from watching content in countries where its not licensed for viewing.

‘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’.

‘The popularity of Netflix in Australia has a lot to do with its progressive approach to content that allowed consumers to access more of the latest release programs from around the world in a timely manner’. So it will begin using technology to thwart proxies and other methods of unblocking a subscriber’s true location, Netflix’s vice-president of content delivery architecture David Fullagar said Thursday in a blog post on the corporate website.

In the past, users could use sites like HideMyAss and Hola to fool Netflix into thinking they were somewhere else.

“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”.

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“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”. It said, “Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory”.

The announcement follows the same path that another American streaming service, Hulu, enforced two years ago when it also cut access to proxy services.

Until very recently, Netflix has denied that they would try and block VPNs, claiming that it would be impractical to do so.

Netflix said at the time that all of its shows would not be available immediately to subscribers in certain countries, but that it was working towards resolving that.