[soci]

At first, I thought you built a justwatch.com clone. But, after a quick inspection I realized you solve a related but different use-case where the user already paid for the streaming service holding the rights to the media, but not necessarily match the user’s country location. By enabling the user to check in what countries the media is available you also unlock a new business model based on VPN affiliation programs (brilliant!) instead of streaming service affiliation programs like justwatch does. I wonder if both revenues models are complementary in the long run.

It’s nuts that watching media from another country for a streaming service I pay for is as easy as changing my IP to the desired country. Does it really work in this way?

Also, I hope you can provide some light on whether you are gaining any traction and unlocking vpn subcriptions revenue.

Suggestion: let the user select from what country it connects And/or automatically detect it. I’m in Europe and it’s confusing it offers me to stream from my own country using a vpn.

[GrifMD]

It's been a few years since I've used a VPN with streaming, but I recall some services not working well with it. I was in Australia with NordVPN to the US on a fibre connection.

[yurishimo]

Yea it all depends on if the service allows it. Netflix commonly showed me a “sorry you’re using a vpn so disable it” message and no amount of new sessions or incognito windows or exit nodes would fix it.

Perhaps this has changed since that time, but I imagine it’s more likely a pacification measure to streaming services to point to for rights holders and if it “accidentally breaks” all the time, they can point the blame at someone else and spend 6 weeks “fixing” it, only for it to “break” again a couple of weeks later. /tinfoil

[dspillett]

> Netflix commonly showed me a “sorry you’re using a vpn

> Perhaps this has changed

It is an ongoing arms race. Sometimes the VPN providers are winning, sometimes the streaming services make a temporarily successful counter-offensive, sometimes the battleground is a mess with things working for some mixes of vpn/country/streamer but not others.⁰

The streaming services block the address ranges of known data-centres, though not commercial addresses more generally because there is often enough a cross-over between residential and commercial ISP accounts¹² so that is one workaround VPN providers can use in their choice of exit points (though bandwidth can be significantly more expensive that way than from a DC).

I'm not aware of it actually being done, but I'd not be surprised to find a less ethical VPN business hasn't tried to use their customers as a mesh and redirecting traffic around them as needed much like botnets use compromised hosts to forward requests. There are obvious technical difficulties here that make it a less practical idea³ but I can imagine someone trying it.

--

[0] Reference: I don't use a VPN this way myself, preferring the other major unlicensed media access route, bit I know a few people who do with varying levels of success over time.

[1] My home account is essentially a commercial one as that is the ISPs main customer base, I use them for a number of reasons (fixed IPv4 that I can run servers off, in fact a /29 of v4 addresses though that is a lot less important to me now than it was some years ago, native IPv6 which is still no commonplace here (though I still haven't set that up properly after all this time!), much better support when things fail, so I'm not the one spending time chasing BT OR, etc.)

[2] Similarly, many small offices actually run their access off what is targetted as a residential account. And small businesses based in/around a home are another grey area.

[3] In many places most residential users have significantly asymmetric bandwidth, throttling their ability to be used as a relay, and a mix of accounts from different countries looking to come from the same address might trip the streaming services' account anomaly detection heuristics.

[supriyo-biswas]

They could just use the country of the credit card as an indicator for what movies to allow access to.

I believe the reason for not doing this is simply because streaming providers would like to keep that option open to avoid losing a customer.

[yurishimo]

There is also the very real part of life that exists in traveling. Especially if you live in Europe, you can find yourself in a different country with different media rights in less than an hour or two in a lot of cases. In those scenarios, it's important to not only manage the complexity of your own customers and the needs of the business as well.

[mikeweiss]

This mesh your describing is done by Hola VPN. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hola_(VPN)

It was the source of much controversy about 10 years ago now for selling their users as exit nodes.

[yieldcrv]

Residential VPN

they're just blocking data centers

[OJFord]

Netflix never works for me ('title not available try another one or again later' or something, on everything). I'm not even using it to try to change my country, wish there was some other way to verify that. (Or better, that licencing was such that they just didn't care, and nobody would need to use one to change country anyway.)

[TylerE]

Ironically the US is one of the worst countries to use as a streaming endpoint because so many of the primary rightsholders are based here, and only license content to their preferred network.

[ant6n]

I used to pay for a service that only ran the Netflix country detection through a VPN, so we could switch countries easily. But Netflix cracked down on this service and VPNs about 5 years ago and it stopped working. Oh well.

[fastball]

justwatch.com lets you check different countries as well.

[jedberg]

> It’s nuts that watching media from another country for a streaming service I pay for is as easy as changing my IP to the desired country. Does it really work in this way?

Not anymore. Netflix will block your account if the same device jumps countries faster than is possible via normal travel. Also they block all the public VPNs.