Comment by h3half
9 days ago
As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Which sounds like a silly question ("of course the marketing is BS") but why even bother marketing if the core value proposition of your billed-monthly service doesn't work? Seems like a waste of money since you'll at most get people for one month when they cancel after realizing they can't watch Canadian Netflix from Florida, or whatever.
> As someone totally uninformed, are you saying that all those YouTube ads about e.g. Private Internet Access (et al), which specifically cite getting around geo restrictions in the ad copy, are BS?
Yep, they are all lying to you, but with a wiggle room for a workaround or to point the blame at Netflix. Once you get in, you'll notice that Netflix, Prime Video, Steam, some of YouTube, and pretty much any legitimate service with geo-fencing not working. You then email support complaining that this is not working for you. The answer varies depending on the company. For example:
- Private Internet Access will try to up sell you for your own static IP. That hopefully remains undiscovered by Netflix et al for a bit. (Obviously you're trading anonymity and privacy aspects of a VPN if it's a static ip attached to you, but I don't think people trying to stream Netflix from Italy or where ever care about that)
- Mullvad will tell you: yeah that doesn't work. We never advertised that. Don't renew next month.
- Proton will keep asking you to try endpoints manually (each country has hundreds of endpoints and their app picks a random one. Just keep trying different ones manually. They might give your account access to some "new endpoints" (if they have them) that are not blocked yet. Hopefully once the refund period has passed, they will tell you "sorry we're having trouble with Netflix currently. we're working on it"
Some of them will suggest using "another streaming service??" because "Netflix is having issues in [INSERT_COUNTRY]"
This hasn’t been my experience at all. I use one of the big VPN services advertised on YouTube sponsorships (but not one of the ones you named) and watch Netflix Canada through it all the time. I’ve also been able to use iPlayer.
I can confirm that PIA does not reliably get around geo restrictions. There's only so many IPs in the pool, and the content providers will block them.
There are alternatives like Hola VPN, a "free" peer to peer VPN except non-paying users have traffic routed through them. But performance of peer to peer VPNs are not as good.
Apart from the first month don't forget those that subscribe and forget about it or subscribe for Netflix and use it for something else on top of those that cancel after the first period.
The 1 month period is also usually priced much higher anways. E.g. PIA is currently $11.95/m for 1 month, $39.96 for 1 year, and $79.17 for 3.25 years (instead of half a year @ monthly). With a curve that steep it's obvious they have severe retention issues at short intervals.
considering PIA also still has their sponsors spill the usual "don't connect to a public wifi without a VPN! or else hackers can see everything!!" (SSL/TLS solved this problem a long time ago) yeah I would take anything they and many others claim in ads.
Streaming services don't have any incentive to ban traffic from non-residential addresses right now. But they might with enough legislative pressure.
True! They only need to make a show of trying their best, in order to appease grumpy copyright holders. I don’t think I’d pay for Netflix anymore if I could only watch the pathetic US catalog, and there are surely many others like me. And Netflix knows that.