I heard someone saying that there are different movies/shows on Netflix depending on which feed you get. How does one go about changing their US feed to the UK feed for example?
I’ve never heard of different feeds but I am unsurprised that there are different ones for different countries. I would bet that the purpose of different feeds is for licensing and fee purposes (to the film rights holders) as much as in customizing the offerings to the audience. Because of that, I’d bet that there is no way to get a feed outside of its intended geographic area.
I’m pretty sure there are different sources of feeds in the US to optimize streaming, but AFAIK there is no difference in what is available.
use an UK or US proxy server to make your connection through
You’d be very wrong about that. Licensing needs to happen in each separate country so the availability of streaming titles in the UK is much, much smaller than it is in the US.
According to this siteit’s ~10,300 in the US versus ~3400 in the UK. Not sure how pinpoint accurate it is but I wholly believe the numbers. Lots of media has very different licensing depending on what country you’re in.
Anyway…OP you don’t want to get yourself restricted to the UK streaming list. If you want to go the other way, from the UK to the US, well then you’ve got to do some subterfuge.
I doubt that’s enough, as if you’re a US subscriber of Netflix, your account is almost certainly not going to let you access UK content. I imagine that you’d need to set up an account on Netflix UK.
Why wouldn’t they let it work?
And what would they do as an alternative?
If I take my mobile device overseas…
…will they keep a copy of the US stream on all of the foreign servers to serve me?
…will they connect me back to a US server from ther other side of the world?
…will they simply deny me access?
They could just let me log in and access the stream from w/e country I happen to be in.
Eh, what? Do you think that every Web site in the world has content on a server located in every country in the world or else its content isn’t available in that country?
It’s not a matter of technology it’s strictly a matter of licensing agreements. If their agreement with the copyright holder of the material in question is “We will only let people with American addresses, using American-issued credit cards access your movie online” then that’s the agreement.
The agreement might possibly be related to IP address/network but since subscribers might be travelers, that might not be the case.
I think that Netflix has different feeds for UK and US users.
And that means that they store copies of all of their various feeds on all servers?
Or do they store geographically significant feeds on servers which are startegically located?
Or does Netflix just have one server to which all users connect?
If they have geographically distinct servers, it seems likely that the servers would host the content which is geographically appropriate.
No it means that when you sign on your account has access to whatever the license agreement allows for your account.
There’s a database somewhere where you’ve got a field marked TRUE or FALSE and that’s about it.
Which brings us back to the question about where the content you have access to is located.
If I am an American travelling in the UK and I log on to Netflix, my credential are verified by a server somewhere and the db checkbox you mention is examined.
If it shows that I am an American…
does it connect me back to the US servers where the US feeds are hosted?
does it connect me to a UK server which has a copy of the US feed on it?
does it connect me to their server which hosts all of everything for everyone and only let me have access to the US feed?
does it merely deny me access because I am out of zone?
Yep.
Nope. There is no “US feed” there is only "A list of movies we have available to stream.
Yes. It only lets you have access to movies which are licensed to people who have US-based accounts.
Their licensing is most likely not at-the-minute-location based. It’s based on what account you signed up for and paid for. If you are an American with an American address and signed up for an American account on Netflix.com then you will have access to movies licensed to stream to Americans with American accounts, no matter where you are in the world.
Simplified*: There is one database on one server. There is one server that hosts all the movies. There is one table in the database with all the movies. There is one table in the database with all the customers. There is one table that shows which customers with which flags can watch which movies.
There is not one different server in every country in the world that only hosts movies available to that country. No, no, no.
This is the INTER-NET. Not the EXTRA-POINT.
*Yes I know there are redundant servers and thousands of them. But I am simplifying it.
So travelling, there will be hella lag beaming multi-GB files around the globe
There is more than a list. there are the actual files which are the movies. Those movies take up space on a drive somewhere.
By them connecting you to a server on the other side of the world.
Why shouldn’t they only host the movies which are available in a certain geographical location in that certain geographical location? Why should they host the other 7000+ videos on their UK servers which primarily serve people with access to only 3400+ videos?
Why would they waste all of that storage?
Your theory is that they have the exact same set of content on all of their servers world wide instead of tailoring the hosted content to the geography?
fwiw, a UK proxy would let Americans watch Breaking Bad the day after they were shown in the US.
The Canadian feed for Netflix is sorely limited compared to the U.S. feed. I know of those who bypass the Canadian feed via proxies and other methods to get the much richer content viewable by our southern neighbours. Given that I am not convinced that it’s above board and legal, I haven’t pursued it so I have no actual experience, just second hand claims.
Many people here in Canada do this. If you set up your system to appear as though it’s in the US, you can access the American Netflix with your Canadian Netflix account.
That’s not true. What Netflix has available to stream absolutely depends on where you’re physically located (or where your IP address says you’re physically located anyway). You can use your American Netflix account in the UK but you’re only going to get what UK subscribers get for streaming. The same, I’m sure, applies to other countries. When you log in to your account in a different country, Netflix pops up with a little message telling you that if you’re using the service while travelling, the selection is different. Prior to their expansion outside the US, you used to get a message saying that you couldn’t access the video at all outside the US.
So yes, you can change your Netflix feed through a proxy server, but if you’re in the US, it’s not worth it.
Im in Canada, and we just simply change the DNS values in our bluray player which is wirelessly connected to our router. This also gets around regional blackouts using NHL Gamecenter.
A little more detail… it started because I know someone from the UK who came on a trip to the US. They were amazed a how much extra they suddenly had available. Somewhere along the line it was mentioned that we only had Breaking Bad through episode 8 of the last season, while it apparently is all available in the UK. I thought if it was easy and kosher I’d try to get the UK feed to watch the final episodes.
It now looks like it is at best a violation of the terms and conditions with Netflix, and at worst breaking some licensing laws so I don’t plan to pursue it any further. Thanks for the info though.
Maybe if I can’t wait a few more weeks until the DVD’s come out I’ll just hop on a plane and pop over seas and watch it.
You can watch the final episodes of Breaking Bad thru Amazon for $1.99 per episode.
We were in Ireland last summer for several weeks. When we tried to watch my Netflix account in Ireland, Netflix gave some message about being unavailable based on location (but I forget exactly what the message was). One of my kids cleverly figure out that she could sign up for a free trial month of Netflix Ireland, which she did. It had a much smaller, but somewhat different selection of shows than Netflix in the U.S.