Netflix Password sharing crackdown

Yes, when I first looked at ordering from Amazon, for any small items the shipping cost in Canada at the time made the purchases not worthwhile - so having the shipping automatically covered - the streaming is jut a bonus.

There is a streaming service in Canada called “Crave”. When it started, it outbid Netflix for a lot of Canadian licenses, since Canada was not as important a market at the time for Netflix. Then, Crave got our federal government to pressure Netflix to enforce the “no VPN to get USA content”. Considering Crave is owned by Bell media, and at the time I was sorely disappointed with the cost and quality of Bell satellite TV service, I’ve avoided anything to do with Crave. Media concentration in Canada makes the USA look like an actual free market by comparison, and I see no reason to encourage a monopoly.

FWIW the way streaming services block VPN is most major VPNs use “known blocks” of IP addresses. There are some VPNs that actually automatically rotate new IP lists very rapidly, and immediately surrender any IP that gets added to a streaming service block list, that bypass such things.

Interesting. I used a VPN to watch the olympics in CBC, because their coverage is so much better than NBC’s (and I can’t pick up NBC’s over the air signal, which would probably have been good enough for me.) Every so often, CBC would refuse to connect, because I wasn’t in Canada. Then I would restart by VPN and it worked again. I wonder if that’s what was happening.

(I also watched the Great Canadian Baking Show while I was there. That’s great, and I spent some energy looking for a way to buy it in the US, but failed to find one.)