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Video-streaming giant Netflix has said it is going to stop subscribers from using internet proxies to view content not available in their home countries.
Due to licensing agreements, Netflix content varies between countries - many users have a virtual private network (VPN) or other proxy to get round this.
The firm said it would increase efforts in the next few weeks to block the use of such proxies.
Netflix expanded streaming services to more than 130 countries last week.
But some countries have more content than others - for example, the Australian Netflix catalogue has only about 10% of the content available to its US subscribers.
David Fullagar, vice president of content delivery architecture, said in a blog post on Thursday that the US firm was in the process of licensing content around the world.
But he said it had a long way to go before it could offer viewers the same films and shows everywhere.
Oh well, back to BitTorrent.
(Score: 2) by Appalbarry on Saturday January 16 2016, @07:50PM
Forget the probably fictional claim that Netflix (and by extension Hulu, Amazon, the BBC etc) will suddenly block all proxies, My guess is that the real meat of the article is this:
Netflix and their competitors know full well that a significant part of their income comes from viewers in unlicensed territories - especially China - and aren't likely to make any significant effort to block those people.
I'd be very surprised if Netflix et al weren't already sitting down with content companies and saying "We know we really can't block this, and you know we really can't block this. Let's figure out how to maximize everyone's profits at the same time."
The way will be to get rid of geographic restrictions, and just have one global market, with everyone accessing the same pool of content.
Netflix has proved one thing: people will pay a reasonable price if you can give them enough content that they want to watch. Once you get into hundreds of millions of users even the MPAA types will realize that there's money to be made.
In fact, I'll bet that the biggest campaigners against Netflix and global licencing agreements are the cable companies that are getting hammered, not the movie studios.