| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Netflix enrages Canada by actually following through with VPN crackdown plans
Tensions are rising between Netflix and the people of Canada once again this week as more border-hopping subscribers find out first-hand that the streaming service wasn’t bluffing about that whole “VPN crackdown” thing.
This particular storm started brewing back in January, when Netflix announced that it would be taking steps to prevent members from using virtual private networks, proxies or unblocking services “to fool our systems into thinking they’re in a different country than they’re actually in.”
As most non-American Netflix users well know, the streaming service offers each of its roughly 190 markets different volumes and types of programming based on region-exclusive content licensing agreements.
At press time, Canadian Netflix users could access approximately 4,000 movies and shows, while nearly 7,000 titles were available to subscribers in the U.S.
For many people, however, getting around geo-restrictions is as much about the quality of these titles as it is about quantity.
Since Netflix announced that it would be cracking down on customers who use VPNs, intermittent reports of payment problems withun blocking companies have been rolling in — alongside reports of Canadians finding ways around these problems to continue watching U.S.-restricted Netflix content.
This weekend, however, the tone among border-hopping Netflix viewers changed.
Redditors and Twitter users have been frantically complaining of massive outages among subscription VPN services like Unblock-Us-com, which according to Postmedia’s Jim Slotek ”seems to have had its access [to] U.S. Netflix crippled” as of Sunday.
Unblock-Us, which just two days ago was actively apologizing to customers on Twitter and Facebook for outages, now appears to have wiped all of the content from its Facebook page. While some tweets replying to customers remain intact, only one post, published Monday, can be seen by looking at the main Unblock-Us Twitter feed.
