In 2013, Netflix chief content officer Ted Sarandos laid out Netflix’s long-term strategy for all to see. “The goal,” Sarandos said, “is to become HBO faster than HBO can become us.” In other words, Netflix’s ultimate goal was to develop a massive library of compelling and original content a’la HBO.
Netflix’s effort in this regard has been nothing short of a success. The company today churns out more original content than anyone can realistically keep up with. Moreover, the streaming giant also boasts an impressive library of licensed content across a multitude of genres. All told, there’s something worth watching on Netflix no matter what your tastes might be.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that not all Netflix content is available to subscribers across all corners of the globe. Thanks to thorny and complex licensing laws, Netflix subscribers in some geographic regions are precluded from watching certain content.
In an effort to work around this, many users relied upon VPN services as a means to mask their true location and access additional content. Specifically, this proved to be incredibly useful for subscribers in countries with relatively small Netflix libraries.
The VPN strategy worked like a charm for quite some time, but Netflix back in 2016 began to clamp down on VPNs.
As the company noted at the time:
If all of our content were globally available, there wouldn’t be a reason for members to use proxies or “unblockers” to fool our systems into thinking they’re in a different country than they’re actually in. We are making progress in licensing content across the world and, as of last week, now offer the Netflix service in 190 countries, but we have a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere.
While Netflix’s new approach has been mostly successful, there are still workable VPNs out there in spite of Netflix’s ongoing vigilance. To this point, TheBestVpn recently ventured out to see how many VPNs can still be used to access otherwise locked-out Netflix content.
“We tested 67 VPN providers to see if they were still able to access the streaming site, two years into the ban,” the report reads. The testing found that “70% of VPNs can still access Netflix from one or more servers.”
It’s a rather thorough review and you can check out their full findings over here.
Link removed due to questionable source.
