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NETFLIX RECENTLY ANNOUNCED it had launched in another 130 countries around the world, bringing the total number of countries it’s available in to 190.
While it’s great news for the company itself, it’s not so good for those who use a proxy or Virtual Private Network (VPN) to access shows and movies in other territories.
The company announced its intention to clamp down on proxies and unblockers over the coming weeks, with its global expansion a key reason for it.
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For certain shows and movies, Netflix only owns the rights to show them in certain territories and while the aim is to have content consistent across the globe, licensing agreements means this won’t be happening anytime soon.
“If all of our content were globally available, there wouldn’t be a reason for members to use proxies or “unblockers” to fool our systems into thinking they’re in a different country than they’re actually in,” said Netflix’s David Fullagar. “In the meantime, we will continue to respect and enforce content licensing by geographic location”.
To address this, we employ the same or similar measures other firms do. This technology continues to evolve and we are evolving with it. That means in coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are. We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies.
When it announced its expansion last week, its CEO Reed Hastings said the company hopes to see the same content available on all versions “over the next five to ten years”.
“We want citizens of the world to have the same content… that’s going to be available in every country of the world. And all of our new originals are like that,” he said.
So as we build the library, as we do more licensing and renew existing deals, we’re getting to the state over the next five or ten years where everything will be consistent around Netflix and everything will be available globally.
please hurry up. I’m being charged e80 a month by onwave for a 20mb connection and I rarely get above 1.5mb. In fact my upload speed is 4 times faster than my download speed 9 times out of ten.
Someone needs to do an expose on satellite broadband speeds in Ireland. It’s a rip off and needs to be exposed.
WAP was still two way. This, like aertel, is one way, so you would receive all the possible pages in one small subset of the internet and hopefully whatever page you want to look at is contained in there.
The mother in laws house has very bad mobile and broadband coverage. Nice to go out there and forget about the phone for a while. This might put an end to this.
What’ll happen to all those fiber optic cables being put in all over the country then? Also, hate to be a stickler about this, but what about the EMF/radiation exposure this would cause? The health implications would really need to be thoroughly and independently investigated.
Minimum orbit is 300km, max wifi usually 30m (Max theoretical TDMA range is around 15km). I get the feeling this is an investor trick, but they’ll have to come up with new ideas. Also transmitters for 2 way are over a metre in size for rubbish internet – even Niall Quinn couldn’t sell you that.
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