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Netflix TV shows disappeared? It's because of VPN.
Just a quick PSA, if anyone noticed massive amounts of shows disappeared from Netflix the past week or two. Apparently they're getting stricter with VPN detection, and blocking per region licensed shows if we're on VPN.
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Stremio + utorrentio plugin pairs well with a VPN, and your shows won't ever go away.
put.io is even better, and you don’t even need a vpn :)
I've used the setup described above for all my devices for many years at this point with no edits to my process. I don't trust any domain to last terribly long, and I don't have the patience to look up the hottest domain every 6-8 months when the current one gets killed. I want a nice UI, all my movies and shows, and no fuss.
I'm curious why they're bothering. I know it was an open secret that you could just bypass the license restrictions, but that always seemed like something the license holder, not the distributor, would care about. Shouldn't Netflix want their library to be larger than they're paying for while just telling the license holders "it's a shame that VPNs work, but nothing we can do"?
They could be getting pressure from license holders.
I'm not sure why the license holders they're actually paying would care either. If anything they could make use of the international watch time of their content to try negotiate higher license fees. The license holders that I'd assume would actually be upset are the ones they aren't paying.
What I mean by this is that if Netflix has the rights to distribute Show A in Canada but not the US, presumably due to different holders of the international rights, then only the holder of Show A's US rights really lose out. Netflix gets the larger library. The Canadian rights holder gets increased value of the property they hold the license to. The US rights holder loses out, but in a way that isn't really protected by the legal system so not sure why Netflix would care about them.
Obviously they do though, so I must be missing something. Or maybe it's that Netflix just wants to kill the negotiating power of holders that say things like "I know this is officially only the rights to The Office in Canada, but we both know it's more valuable than that" even at the cost of their own library taking a hit.
Admittedly I'm not very up-to-date with the goings on of Netflix though. I dropped them years ago when it became apparent to me that they'd shifted from providing value to enshittifying while raising prices.
Netflix might just be concerned about the possibility of any lawsuit with a strong foundation going to court anywhere given that how expensive good lawyers are.
Continuing to smoothly operate internationally is far more important to them than any extra appeal to the subset of customers using a VPN.
If I'm Sony, I would care because my exclusive licenses are only worth what they are because they're exclusive. If Apple paid me $10 million for the exclusive rights to stream Spider-Man in the US and everyone was actually watching it on Netflix through a VPN to Canada, then Apple won't be happy and won't pay as much in the future.
Might also be a competition thing? Not sure how other streaming services are doing on the VPN front, but if other services crack down more, then that may play a role beyond who is the highest bidder when it comes time to license out the show for whichever region. At a certain point isn't it just a lot of the same players behind most of the shows? So maybe they don't get stiffed on a specific show because of that behavior, but something else they control the rights to might, and perhaps that pressures Netflix to accommodate across the board.