Måske slut med amerikansk Netflix?

Da vi skrev en stort set identisk historie for et år siden, var det falsk alarm, men meget tyder på, at det er alvor denne gang: Efter at Netflix sidste uge åbnede for deres streaming-tjeneste i 130 nye lande, vil streaming-giganten gøre det umuligt for brugerne at tilgå tjenesten på tværs af landegrænser ved hjælp af VPN- og DNS-tjenester som Overplay, TorGuard eller UnblockUS.

Med en af de førnævnte tjenester kan man kamuflere sin egen IP-adresse og tilgå Netflix som om man sad i USA og dermed få adgang til det noget større udbud af indhold, som den amerikanske Netflix-udgave indeholder i forhold til Netflix i Danmark.

For et år siden afviste Netflix over for Engadget, at man havde tænkt sig at blokere for VPN-tjenester, og ovennævnte historie viste sig at være en and, men nu hvor Netflix er blevet tilgængelig i hele verden på nær ganske få steder som Kina, Nordkorea og Syrien, har piben fået en anden lyd.

I hvert fald har David Fullagar, Vice President for Content Delivery Architecture hos Netflix, netop offentliggjort følgende indlæg på Netflix Media Center:

Evolving Proxy Detection as a Global Service
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. We are making progress in licensing content across the world and, as of last week, now offer the Netflix service in 190 countries, but we have a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere.

Over time, we anticipate being able to do so. For now, given the historic practice of licensing content by geographic territories, the TV shows and movies we offer differ, to varying degrees, by territory. In the meantime, we will continue to respect and enforce content licensing by geographic location.

Some members use proxies or “unblockers” to access titles available outside their territory. 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.

We look forward to offering all of our content everywhere and to consumers being able to enjoy all of Netflix without using a proxy. That’s the goal we will keep pushing towards.
–David