netflix_temp

Right - the legal system didn't have this problem before.

If you took a vacation in France, you could only watch what was on French TV or in their Cinemas.

Times have changed, and we'll suffer while old industries catch up.

It's not that they haven't thought about it. It's that it is not legally and economically viable (for them).

Media licensing, The broadcast industry, and the lawyers firmly attached to it, pre-existed the Internet.

So now we have laws and customs from the 1930s governing streaming tv on the Internet.

That's right, it is largely out of their hands, but as time goes on, they will have more control over it.

For example, say they want to license a show, and they get it for one year for $50k, usa-only.

Okay, but we want it world-wide. Alright, that will be 3 million, world-wide, except Australia. Okay. wait, what?

We have a 7-year contract on Australia right now. We can't give you Australia.

Now netflix has to decide if it's worth it for the 350 people who want to watch this in Europe and Asia to take the second deal.

Sucks.

> Sounds like netflix is in a bind here. They are only licensed to show content in specific regions, and there are no doubt penalties by the actual copyright holders of they go outside those bounds.

Bingo.

> They must be buying a database of IP address locations and VPN addresses from somebody. I doubt they are putting that together themselves.

Ehhh, I couldn't say. I mean, I could. But I won't.

Media companies got used to maximizing profits by region locking.

Media company lawyers got used to writing those contracts.

They are entrenched until people start successfully negotiating global licenses.

Because the people who own the rights to that think "I might be able to sell the USA rights".

> So.. people are actively looking for vpns and proxies to actually pay netflix to get content, and netflix actively fights then, so they cannot get the content they (want to) pay for.

Correct. Because the contracts they have to sign to get the shows you want to watch often come with crazy regional licensing.

Correct.

Excellent point, but if you spend time looking into this area, you will find there is not a lot of good research published.

Yes, and Netflix knows about that report,too.

No, the second idea is silly. They already have buckets of information. In fact, they have a whole team dedicated to making sure they don't hold onto certain types of PII (Personally identifiable Info)

They have their flaws, but they don't waste time doing useless shit (once they have figured that out).

I mean, obviously they notice which accounts are breaking whatever rules are currently in force.

The way this works is, the content provider (actually, someone working on the content provider's behalf) does an independent check every so often.

Then they (the content lawyers) come back to Netflix and say "hey, 10% of these attempts got through, you are breaking our deal.

Obviously, some of these of these service providers are not the brightest bulbs on the internet, but try telling that to the legal department of a media conglomerate.

So, the technical team that handles this at Netflix has to shoot for the worst case, instead of the average case, even if they are already being effective.