Netflix responds to the VPN ban backlash: 'It's really inconsequential to us'
It hasn't hurt its revenues, but it has angered a portion of its customer base.
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Your support makes all the difference.Netflix's announcement in January that it would be increasing its efforts to block users from circumventing region blockades turned out not to be an empty threat, with hosts of popular VPN services being rendered useless for this purpose overnight.
There was uproar from customers, some of which simply use VPNs to protect their privacy, with a petition calling for the ban to be lifted attracting over 40,000 signatures.
But it seems Netflix, which generally cherishes its user experience, doesn’t seem fussed by this uprising.
“It’s a very small but quite vocal minority,” CEO Reed Hastings said during this week’s earnings call. “So it’s really inconsequential to us, as you could see in the Q1 results.”
Discussing the streaming service’s crackdown, a VPN operator told TorrentFreak: “They are now coming from a few hundred different possible subdomains.
“This makes it much more expensive for us to circumvent because we would basically need to forward all Netflix traffic through our servers instead of just the packets that do the geolocation.”
While Netflix isn’t willing to turn a blind eye to/is under pressure not to allow VPN use, it does understand the urgent need for borderless content.
After Netflix announced on Twitter recently that it was now “everywhere”, a follower replied: “and same content everywhere…?”
“Still prisoners of territorial licensing,” Netflix responded, “moving quickly to have global availability of all content on Netflix.”
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Hastings previously expressed the same sentiment, saying: “The basic solution is for Netflix to get global and have its content be the same all around the world so there’s no incentive to [use a VPN].
"The VPN thing is a small little asterisk compared to piracy. [It] is really the problem around the world.
"The key thing about piracy is that some fraction of it is because [users] couldn’t get the content. That part we can fix.
"Some part of piracy however is because they just don’t want to pay. That’s a harder part. As an industry, we need to fix global content."
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