Posted in: Online Services

Netflix starts blocking VPN users

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Netflix maybe an excellent service, full of great content, which can be accessed from pretty much any device these days, but it is also seriously limited geographically. Due to licensing issues, the service can be accessed from only a handful of countries around the world, and even then the content is not the same everywhere.

To get around the location issue, many of the users have been using VPN. Unfortunately, the movie studios aren’t too happy with that, which has resulted in Netflix slowly starting to block VPN services.

Not everyone will see the effects of this immediately but others may have noticed already. The Android app reportedly forces the use of Google DNS to avoid DNS based location unblockers, and those using TorGuard have also been cut off.

This is rather unfortunate as even though the people were outside the circles where Netflix operates, they were still paying customers, who could have very well chosen to pirate but instead were paying to use Netflix instead. If Netflix comes down harder on VPN users, people may have to start looking at other options, some of which may not necessarily be legal. Let’s see what the movie studios think of that, then.

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