I know that it's not Netflix's fault per se and they're under pressure from the dinosaurs running the media companies. However really well done - you're now leaving people with no choice but to torrent again.
My solution to this was to pay a friend in the states to share his residential connection. I'd like to see them try and block Comcast's residential blocks.<p>There's potential here for a middleman to write software/develop hardware that can share residential connections whilst filtering destination IPs (e.g. allowing AWS addresses) to try and minimize the potential for abuse with the goal of discouraging traffic other than that required for Netflix. The user using the service would pay a fee which the middleman would take a cut from, with the rest going towards the home owner's broadband costs.<p>Payment is still problematic, ideally I'd be using a US bank account and credit card. But if they start clamping down on use of 'foreign' credit cards they will alienate those taking vacations etc.
Netflix has been messing with settings in their system that are breaking the experience for users in the middle of the US too. For the last two weekends I've been getting strange experiences accessing their site from my house.<p>My PC works fine and can access content. My cell phone, connected to the same home wireless randomly gets messages "You are using a proxy and cannot access this content". Testing both units on whatismyip.com and my own web server show that requests are coming from the same IP. A day or two later it will start working just fine. Stop breaking things or I'll just stick with Amazon and drop your service.
Their data scientists will now be building features like "tried to watch a movie from a VPN IP" for their churn models.<p>And another note: there are also people who simply do not allow comcast to filter their traffic and therefore always have a VPN. These people despite their efforts to watch netflix content approved for their own country, would be blocked.
> UFlix<p>Maybe they should not call it UFlix but something like "VPN for your business needs, and for avoiding corrupt and oppressive governments".
What bothers me the most is that Netflix declared Hurricane Electric's Tunnelbroker service a VPN. I have IPv6 on my home network via HE.net and, since Netflix is a good network citizen and supports IPv6, I can't watch on my computer or any other device that also talks v6.<p>My household gave up our Netflix subscription in lieu of giving up IPv6.
I was about to cancel my Netflix subscription as my family had exhausted its interest in the paltry syndicated cast-offs and young-adult anime that amounted to the totality of Canadian Netflix; but then Stranger Things came out, along with the rest of their fall originals.<p>Well, you've got me hooked for another month or two.
This is a small issue in Netflix's path to its end-game. As content owners build their own streaming platforms in the US, Netflix is gradually losing content but in the meantime its gaining more exclusive content. At some point the exclusive content will be enough to justify international users paying for it Netflix since that content is not region blocked.<p>Netflix also seems to be striking some good deals to lure in more international viewers, e.g. they recently acquired the world-wide rights minus US for the new Star Trek series and also the well regarded The Expanse series by SyFy which is a great bonus considering subscribers in US would need to have services at additional cost in order to watch them.
It is interesting to note, that in a consumer focused market such as the US, highly competitive areas consider "the customer is always right" (I.e. catering and hospitality). In oligopolistic niches, the customer is unimportant (I.e. broadband provision), and in monopolistic niches, such as media consumption, "the customer is always a criminal".<p>It says a great deal about the market conditions of the media industry.
I doubt anyone on HN would pay for a service like UFlix when the DIY alternative is much more efficient.<p>For less cost we use our own US-based vps, running something like the shadowsocks proxy. It's the same rig we found to work the best in China against the great firewall.<p>With its own dedicated IP, it would likely be cost-inefficient for Netflix to detect without blocking an entire range of legitimate IP addresses.
There's so much content on Canadian Netflix these days (Star Wars!), why would anyone bother with it?<p>As an aside, when I was in Paris, a hotel I was staying at routed their free WiFi through a US VPN (presumably so the Americans wouldn't be offended by having Google return results in French or some shit), and I couldn't even watch French Netflix in France! So annoying.
This is pretty annoying but I will say that I still get my moneys worth out of watching international netflix. All of their original titles are available across all regions and they are coming out with new stuff at an increasing rate. When we really want more we just rent a movie on the apple tv every once in awhile.
Huh, people put blame for their piracy on Netflix as if they are suppose to take moral responsibility for pirate's actions. Just like people have freedom to not watch content they do not want to, rights owner should have freedom to not show content to those they don't want to.
I just tried it from a commercial VPN provider. Tried New York, Miami, Los Angeles and Atlanta.<p>Worked just fine. I was able to watch a show that's only on American Netflix.<p>I also have a VPS in Texas that I use with openvpn. It works fine too.<p>Are they just blocking the "watch American Netflix" services?
This is one way to increase and encourage piracy while pissing off customers, including those in the US like myself, who like to keep the VPN on all the time. They deserve all the lost revenue this brings them.