Netflix renews commitment to cracking down on VPN users, including South Africans

Netflix has renewed its commitment to cracking down on subscribers using VPNs and proxy services to access its full international library.

In an official blog post, the video on demand (VoD) service says that while it hopes to eventually bring its full library to the whole world, it will continue “respect and enforce content licensing by geographic location”.

And for now that means doing everything it can to prevent people using these services. And that in turn means that in the coming weeks “those using proxies and unblockers will only be able to access the service in the country where they currently are”.

That’s not good news for many South Africans who’ve been using such methods to access Netflix’ international offering for months now. It’s also unlikely to be all that pleasing to South African users not content with the service’s limited local offering.

Read more: UnoTelly wants to remind you that international Netflix sucks

South Africans only have access to around 700 titles, compared with the more than 7 000 available in the US. Thanks to licensing agreements, they also miss out on popular Netfix original productions including Orange is the New Black and House of Cards.

When a Memeburn reporter asked UnoTelly, one of the most popular DNS masking and proxy services around the globe, how it planned to address the problem it said that it “was monitoring the situation and waiting for more information”.

@GrahamZA We are aware of the statement from Netflix. At this point, we are monitoring the situation and waiting for more information.

— UnoTelly (@unotelly) January 15, 2016

“We look forward to offering all of our content everywhere and to consumers being able to enjoy all of Netflix without using a proxy,” said Netflix Vice President of Content Delivery Architecture David Fullager. “That’s the goal we will keep pushing towards”.