Unlocking the geoblock: Australians embrace VPNs
With reports Australians are increasingly looking to overseas streaming services for their content Ramon Lobato and Scott Ewing of Swinburne University of Technology look at the numbers in a cross-posting from The Conversation.
In recent months there have been many reports of Australians covertly signing up for the US streaming service Netflix, using fake postcodes and software workarounds to fool its geo-blocking system.
One industry-commissioned study estimates that up to 200,000 Australians have subscribed to the service in this way.
Geoblocking circumvention is by all accounts a common practice in Australian households – and an industry is emerging to meet the demand for borderless streaming.
Technology seems to be moving faster than companies. The idea of geoblocking is antiquated and cannot last. The global village has well and truly been established. And yet media distributors are still treating the global audience like crap. As a TV and film fan it’s beyond frustrating to not even watch a trailer or a 30 second clip for something I’m interested in. What’s the point? Why not let everyone view advertising? All it does is force people to access VPNs and push them further down the rabbit hole.
Even when Netflix arrives I imagine many will still use a VPN in order to access the content not available in Australia. A simple click and you’re on American Netflix or Canada, or Britain.
VPN use is definitely exploding.
Congratulations local dinosaur industry. You’ve galvanized a generation of Australians to learn the basics of online encryption, just as their government attempts to turn all 1984.
Brandis and co will be left trawling through the metadata of “grandmothers with nothing to hide,” while everyone else gets on with enjoying cheap content in privacy.
VPNS are handy just to avoid the “this video not available in your country” message. I use it for BBC Iplayer and 4od / itv on my blu ray player. I’m thinking about getting another blu ray player and setting that to U.S.
I use VPNS to set my Xbox one to the U.S so that I can purchase games at almost half the price that we pay in Australia.
It’s not surprising that people are using VPN’s to subscribe to an alternative to the style of content being offered content on the antiquated Foxtel….
Bandwidth being their default excuse for their lack of content of course!!
It’s called the WORLD WIDE WEB for a reason.
Geographical restriction is non existent when we are on line.
The web is bigger than local governments, you cant tell us what to do.
The use of VPN’s is astounding, especially with things going on in Australia now a days. I know that a lot of my friends are using VPNs to access material outside of their own country. Personally, I’ve been using Private Internet Access and its been working out real well. Really like their business model and how they state they dont take logs of anything which all VPNs should.
Unfortunately, Netflix is getting more and more difficult to access from different countries…