Sorry to pick on your comment, but I resent (maybe a strong word) businesses telling me things like this: Unless you'll give me something extra when you make massive profits (a discounted subscription? shares?) then don't expect me to make sacrifices for you when you have losses or cash flow problems. Why should I fund your business? Am I an investor? Where is my return? You're selling a service for a price; if the service has problems, the reason why generally is not the customer's concern - that's an internal issue.
A good point; I agree.
But: isn't that what Google Play and Apple's iTunes are doing already - pay per show / movie? How would Netflix differentiate itself by offering such a service?
As an aside, the HN guidelines mention you should avoid complaining about being downvoted.
Once you get global distribution rights to major series, then piracy will probably fall greatly. Until then, either piracy will increase, or folks will bypass geoblocking. I think that the hope should be that people will bypass geoblocking, because the rights holders at least get some money. With piracy, they get absolutely nothing.
Sony has the international rights, if I am not mistaken, and they sold it to different companies across the globe, that now want exclusive rights, so Netflix doesn't eat from their table.
To the commenters above who are disappointed with their country's catalog and plan to cancel their trial: sorry to see you go, but we did the best we could for launch. We make sure canceling is easy, just go to the account page on the website.
As you can imagine, buying the rights for titles in a new region is expensive, so we start off with a giant loss on the balance sheet. But as we get more members we'll be able to buy more content in each country. Here's a list of a few dozen big-name titles that are coming later this year [1]. So we hope you come back soon.
About the patchwork availability - that's not what we want, it's just what was for sale. In the recent past the only buyers of TV shows were just buying for their own country - like country-wide TV networks. For each show, that left a random set of regions where the license was still available. We're trying to get global licenses for everything, so it'll gradually become consistent country-by-country.
[1] https://pr.netflix.com/WebClient/loginPageSalesNetWorksActio... (sorry for the PR link but it's the most complete list of 2016 releases I could find)