Netflix has announced a crackdown on subscribers who use proxies and VPNs to access content that isn't available in their home country.
Following through on last year's changes to the streaming service's terms and conditions, David Fullagar, vice president of content delivery architecture, warns in a blog post that users of proxies and VPNs will soon find themselves prevented from accessing non-local content.
"In coming weeks, those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are," he says. "We are confident this change won’t impact members not using proxies."
While Netflix recently announced that it was extending its services to more than 130 new countries, what they get as part of that service varies wildly from country to country, depending on Netflix's licensing agreements.
In Australia, for example, subscribers only have about a tenth as much content to choose from as those in the US, leading many subscribers to use proxies in order to access the fuller catalog.
These people, though, should be patient, says Netflix.
"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," says Fullagar. "Over time, we anticipate being able to do so."
In the past, Netflix has been relatively relaxed about proxy users, warning that the practice is against the rules but doing nothing to stop it, unlike, say, Apple with iPlayer or HBO, which started enforcing geo-restrictions last year. It's got no direct financial incentive to do so, after all, given that proxy users are still paying subscribers. In any case, many people use VPNs for reasons other than accessing forbidden content - for privacy, say, or to bypass ISP throttling.
But as the company expands its services worldwide, licensing agreements become more complicated. There can't be much money for content providers in granting the rights for, say, Antarctica or Burkina Faso, and a crackdown means that they will at least be getting what they should.
And, in time, being seen to be supporting content providers' rights could help Netflix negotiate truly global licensing deals.
More importantly, forcing customers to be transparent about their location means that Netflix can demonstrate to investors that it is genuinely moving into new markets and gaining subscribers outside the US - which is by now a pretty saturated market for the firm.
The announcement does, though, mean abandoning one potentially massive market: China. While Netflix isn't available there officially, research from Global Web Index last spring revealed that 31% of the 90 million-odd VPN users in the country had accessed Netflix in the previous month.
And while a good two-thirds of these people are believed to have been using shared log-ins, that still leaves millions who have been paying for what will now become a useless subscription - unless they manage to evade the block, that is.
