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Comment by mdasen

I'm a little surprised that Netflix is going to this amount of effort. I certainly understand why Netflix must take reasonable steps to enforce geo-restrictions. If they buy the rights to Star Trek Discovery for the UK, CBS doesn't want them letting Americans watch Star Trek Discovery when they're trying to sell Americans Star Trek Discovery on another platform. Whether you agree with this or not, if Netflix doesn't comply, they won't get content from third parties.

At the same time, one would think this would be an area where Netflix wouldn't care about a very small number of people bypassing restrictions. They need to be seen to be enforcing the restrictions and they need to actually enforce them to a large extent. I guess I'm puzzled as to why they are going above-and-beyond expectations. Are the expectations that high? Have more VPNs made it easy to get around geo-blocks by using residential IP addresses?

It seems like Netflix is potentially going to end up blocking IP addresses of customers while cutting down on a very small amount of people hopping their geo-fences. It also seems like their content providers would be placated by the pretty decent job they do of banning VPNs.

parent mdasen 5 years ago

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