There are different kinds of multilingual. English-German, French-Spanish, Italian-Spanish, basically there is no problem when your languages are co-located. However, try leading a proper multilingual life if you are German-Russian. You couldn't buy a DVD or BluRay with both languages. With streaming, it gets a bit beter, Netflix is actually one of the better players in the market -- more often than not, they do have a Russian translation and subtitles both for their own productions as well as licensed stuff. Disney+ in Germany doesn't seem to have Russian at all, even though they obviously own Russian translations (NB: no streaming service has managed to offer multiple video tracks, i.e. with localized signs in animated films). Maybe this will change when they enter the Russian market (should be this autumn), but again: why does this have to matter to me, living in Germany? The list goes on and on: there is no Russian in Amazon, i.e. Alexa won't understand Russian and also won't understand the titles of any music tracks in Russian (or Japanese for that matter). There is an Alexa equivalent from Yandex called Alice, but you'll be right to guess that I can't just import it to Germany, since it requires geo-blocked russian services to function. It's infuriating, but I guess that's the price we pay for letting US drive the innovation.

Just give me a service where I can pay a €5 per video track, €1 per audio track and €0.50 for a subtitle track with a full catalog of movies and languages from the whole world. Then I can assemble my own Fight Club with English, German and Japanese dubs and Russian, Swedish and Swahili subs without having to resort to piracy.

Until a couple of years ago, google's date picker for custom range search only worked if your locale was set to use the American date format. If your locale used any other other format, it would flip them around and give you a completely different time range. It always amused me how just a couple of clicks from their main product was a case they probably didn't even test for any non-US date formats, and cared so little about it that it took them years to fix it, despite bug reports. In that case, almost all of the non-US world was the edge case.

And if you're multilingual within "monolingual" countries, especially the US, good luck. (microrant: there's no such thing as a monolingual country, and the US has no official language!)

I've gotten emails from multiple bigtechs -- dropbox was one IIRC -- that were half in German, half in English. Or more relevant to Netflix -- your language setting for content has to be the same as your language setting for the UI. I'm sure to some people these things seem like nitpicks, but that's exactly the problem: treating language as an afterthought is such a profoundly middle class white American view. The vast majority of the world works differently, and most tech firms simply don't care. This isn't something trivial. It's a core part of how people interact with the world.

People started to get a clue about this 5-10 years ago though. It used to be much worse. I recall having to deal with it daily and I don't think about it much any more - more like a weekly exception.

In fact, now also I get some places trying to be too helpful to the point of being confusing. For example, a trainer store that auto-detects location and lists prices in GBP but sizes in US (without indication) and doesn't actually have an EU/UK distribution centre. So whoops it's going to take ages to arrive, it gets re-listed in USD at the final checkout, whoops again, 3% charge from my credit card, and then the wrong size arrives. But at least I knew the rough GBP amount!

In World of Warcraft, the Dutch word kunt gets censored because it is a variation of an English curseword. While in Dutch its a very basic word ('can' as in 'you can').

Customer Service rep. was aware of the issue but could not do anything about it.

They are going to use AI in the game more for such moderation, so I hold my breath.

Also, not sure what Spanish implies but Portuguese usually means Brazilian Portuguese. Dutch usually means Dutch, not Flemish, unless its a Belgian production.

As an Indian, it's especially annoying when websites just assume that I want the website in Hindi. We have 22 languages officially recognised in the Constitution, and a few hundred regional dialects, and Hindi is only spoken by 40% of the population. A lower percentage even reads it. I'm good with English, thanks. It's what I think in.

> How useful or convenient tech services are tends to correlate strongly with how close to SF Bay area your life is.

Exactly rule we've deduced with my wife in our trips in South-East Asia and out living in Russia.

Fun story:

In the middle of nowhere in Myanmar we'd stopped to eat in roadside shack (we'd travelled by motorcycle). Food was delicious, and my wife looked up Google Maps while we waited for ordered second dish. To our surprise, this shack was listed on GMaps. We wrote good review, why not? Google Map asks several additional questions, like «Is this place popular among the college crowd» and «Is this place wheelchair-accessible». Nearest college is about 500km to this place, 0.01% of children go to college, and wheelchairs, of course, could be pushed to this shack, as it has ground floor. I mean, no floor at all. It was very funny indeed.

But most of the time same service behavior is not funny, but irritating.

Sony PSN does show the 'van' in some places, and not in others. Apple, same story. Google, same story.

Sometimes when it is supported, they capitalize it. It's a mess.

Likely people at these companies never grokked that Localization is both nation and language - they conflate the two. That's a sad level of stupid.

They do acknowledge multi lingual countries like India.

When is the last time you paid for a google service tho ? Its the height of millenial arrogance to think a compagny should give you a special treatment for free

"For Google, you should type in Google.com/ncr . The NCR means no country redirect ..."

Is there a similar trick that specifies I only want search results that contain the search terms I searched for ?

Probably too much to ask ...

I learned this the other day because Google thinks I want google.co.hk when I access from my VPN IP address (which is in a New Jersey data center). I filled out their "wrong country" form and of course haven't heard back and don't expect to. The /ncr workaround means I have to go to google.com/ncr before searching instead of searching from the browser search bar - annoying!

Is there something like that as well to make the region match the preferred browser settings (in terms of language)?

I was totally unaware of that, thank you, have an uptick!

Imagine that:

- Netflix has a smaller/worse selection in the UK, than in the US, and

- Netflix charges more in the UK than in the US, and

- A UK person could easily get access to Netflix US by getting a friend in the US (or a US-based ebay seller) to set up their Netflix account

It would be nearly impossible for Netflix to comply with their agreements with content owners.

Limiting content based on billing address is easier to bypass than your post suggests.

Contracts with the owners of the movies are a factor: Netflix might not have the right to show a given film in your country. Their contracts with the studios might require them to try to enforce this.

What you are saying makes sense for legit viewers, but the goal of all this geofencing nonsense is ostensibly because content producers want to sue or press charges against pirates. They have to do that where the pirates are physically located, not where they got a credit card.

It is extremely easy to buy card numbers, and Netflix sell pre-paid cards in some territories which are even easier to buy.

But yes, location is the thing that matters in contracts, because that is actually much easier to demonstrate.

I live in Japan and have the same problem with the Massachusetts department of state website (which contains voting information). I contacted my state representative (who does represent me, as I voted for him) and unfortunately he couldn't do much for me other than forward my inquiry.

What about running your own proxy or vpn on a vps?

Do you not have to be a resident of the state to be a voter?

Why no website can do this correctly baffles me. My browser literally tells you what languages I want.

Media licensing, The broadcast industry, and the lawyers firmly attached to it, pre-existed the Internet.

So now we have laws and customs from the 1930s governing streaming tv on the Internet.

No one allowed it.

There was a business need so someone stepped up to fill the void by geomapping IPs. Given legal compliance concerns this was inevitable, even completely ignoring the profit potential from even very coarse-grained (ie. country-level) differential pricing.

Actively preventing this would have necessitated some pretty ugly tradeoffs which no one was incentivized to make.

I move between three countries but have to keep my account region to my family’s because of family sharing.

I keep three accounts for the three regions, two dummy and one main. One inelegant solution I found is to sign out of the main account, sign in with a dummy account and install the apps I need from that region and signing back in with the main account.

> I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store

That's awesome for tourists. Go for a few weeks and you can't access the local apps. Brilliant.

The mobile apps for my US and Taiwanese banks are both region-locked to the US and Taiwan. Once I switched my region to Taiwan the Ally app stopped getting updates and eventually wouldn't let me sign into my account anymore.

> I cannot download specific apps that are only on the Australian Apple App Store.

I wonder if this includes COVID contact tracing apps? It could be a very juicy story if so.

Thanks for the tip. From a 30,000 perspective, it’s crazy that we have to go through the wasteful exercise of shipping gigabytes of video data up and down scarce residential fiber for no other reason than to tick a performative copyright box.

I think free, easy movement between countries is a thing of the past. Climate change is going to lead to nationalist isolation as countries try to preserve their resources as they start to run out.

Things are still largely locked down from the pandemic, and I don’t think international tourism will ever go back to being as easy as it was pre-pandemic. Many formerly bustling tourist sites have decided its really nice not to have tourists.

In this context, I think we can expect the Balkanization of the Internet to continue.

The number of people working abroad globally is set to grow to over a hundred million in the next couple of years. I'd hardly call that niche, especially when that number looks set to continue climbing - especially when you also take into account the boom in remote work.

I'd call it pretty short-sighted to not see that as an ever increasing problem. I'd also posit that a solution wouldn't take a colossal amount of resources to solve in most cases.

Yeah, people who funded/ supported development of content need to die off because they like to recoup their investment in certain ways.

They do this with good intentions because not everyone can change this header (e.g if you're using some locked down browser at a kiosk you may not be able to change this) but it's infuriating for everyone who can.

It's only a legal issue because it's allowed to be.

The concept of "licensing territory" for IP is a 19th century relic. Licensing rights for streamed content could easily be made personal instead of national.

Given the amount of expense and effort required to police specific IPs, it would be likely cheaper to handle this with a fine-grained approach than to keep refining the current mess with ever-more-complex content limiting epicycles.

Yeah like, if the licensing wasn't an issue, Netflix would have a menu somewhere where you could simply select a country. They aren't doing this to be malicious, they just can't legally show certain content in certain countries.

This isn't a particularly good solution as it relies on another person's goodwill, which is neither reliable nor available to everyone.

Assuming that the current geo-located situation continues, and realistically who sees that changing?, what's needed is a legal framework that explicitly allows people from different countries to access citizen-appropriate content in other parts of the world. Why should I have to jump through hoops to access a paid service like Netflix just because I happen to be located abroad for a week?

VPNs were never more than a band-aid solution to relocation problems, and truly are a terrible solution. They don't actually offer anonymity, privacy, or convenience. Their original job - tying remote people into a private network - is the only thing they're truly good at.

FWIW, the "high-tech solution"--if we are already giving up any pretext that we are doing anything "by the book" (which simply isn't going to be allowed any way you slice it)--is to just scrape the movie someone wants out of Netflix and let them download it from you... it 100% "solves the problem" ;P.

Haha. I like your thinking, but it’s sort of what caused this last wave of crackdowns. All those “free” VPN services work by letting you VPN to another locale in return for letting other users use your machine as an exit node into your locale. (I’m guessing) Netflix decided to enumerate the “exit node” IPs for some of the free VPNs, and ended up blocking the residential IPs. I could even see it ensnaring innocent apartment dwellers using a NATed IP or people getting IPs recycled through DHCP.

I'm in a similar situation. Curious if you found a solution, perhaps a VOIP provider that accepts SMS shortcodes?

This is what I eventually had to do. Finding it was tough though, as the navigation was also in Arabic.

US banks and state services so often ban ips outside the US.

Requesting records for anything is really hard when you can't even get the phone numbers from the website.

Having dealt with significant cyber attacks from Ukraine, Lithuania, and Russia, I can’t blame them for blocking. They probably could do it more elegantly however.

Why do I have to tell each website the language I want in a website-specific way when there's been a standard HTTP header[1] to do exactly that for more than 20 years? I'm honestly asking: do web developers ignore know basic HTTP features or is there some specific reason?

> Hollywood & friends will follow some day, just a matter of time.

Will I still be alive, though? Because I've been waiting for some time now.

A VPS as a VPN server is coming from an IP range that belongs to a datacenter and netflix has Bern blockng these for some time atleast from Hetzner.

> A friend in the UK or US willing to put a box on their network and lose some bandwidth.

It’s very tempting to ask a friend to buy a nuc, and just post them a pre-configured .m2 drive. Likely overkill as a Pi or similar would probably suffice.

Only if your VPS is not in a big data centre, as they already block most of those.

terrible advice. almost all vps provider ip ranges are blanket banned

There is a reason you are not a lawyer.

To watch BBC content

> The law says you need to be covered by a TV Licence to: watch or record programmes as they’re being shown on TV, on any channel watch or stream programmes live on an online TV service (such as ITV Hub, All 4, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Now TV, Sky Go, etc.) download or watch any BBC programmes on BBC iPlayer.

I'd say you are the exception here. Most people type google.com to get to Google, wherever they are.

Nice list.

I tried getting my parents internet funneled through UK so that they could watch some stuff...no good. Both netflix and amazon prime picked up that something was off-sides. I suspect it was latency cause other side of world

thanks for listing these!

You have to remember the movie business has been dragged kicking and screaming into progressively larger and larger buckets of money since forever. VCRs? They'll kill the movie industry. DVDs? Same. Blueray, even worse since quality is so good no one will ever buy a movie again. Streaming services? Last one out of Hollywood please turn out the lights. Blah, blah, blah. The then head of the MPAA Jack Valenti literally compared the VCR to a serial killer named the Boston Strangler.

"'I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.' Jack Valenti said this in 1982 in testimony to the House of Representatives on why the VCR should be illegal. He also called the VCR an "avalanche" and a "tidal wave", and said it would make the film industry "bleed and bleed and hemorrhage"

As quoted on slashdot: https://news.slashdot.org/story/02/05/31/1622232/valentis-bo...

My point is yes there are incredibly strict covenants in place and I'm sure they're probably preventing more revenue than they're allegedly protecting.

Yes of course they are!

Netflix signs licensing deals that are per-country, and the licenses require that Netflix actively enforce that media is steamed only to the country in question.

You think Netflix is enforcing these restrictions because it wants to, or because it thinks it's fun to defeat VPN's?

Of course not. All of this effort costs money that obviously Netflix wouldn't be paying if it weren't required to. It's doing so because it's contractually obligated to.

So don't get mad at Netflix. They don't have a choice. They're just doing what their content providers require them to.

Of course there are. Pretty much every stupid geo-restriction, restriction on downloads, restrictions on the number of downloads (why??), etc comes down to some stupid rights holder think this is something they want.

More like pressure than contractual obligations

> I'm surprised they didn't just start banning customers abusing the service.

One of CondoInternet's advertised selling points before they sold to Wave Broadband is that you could buy the 1Gbps service and do whatever you wanted, including run your own servers.

So it wasn't an abuse of the service. Everyone I knew on CondoInternet would buy the highest speed package so they could run Minecraft and Plex and other servers for their friends. It was like having Speakeasy Internet Services SDSL back again but with 200 times the upload.

Port 25 is for unsecured SMTP

VPN's can be on any port

On the other hand, if everyone looks like they're running a VPN, then maybe the companies will be forced not to discriminate. (Although I suppose the same disclaimers about running a Tor exit node apply.)

Same as Bright Data (https://brightdata.com/), formerly Luminati Networks, who apparently use or used HolaVPN customers [1] as exit nodes for their proxy networks and data collection infrastructure. Their current website sheds some light into how they get their residential and mobile IPs [2] (emphasis mine):

> Bright Data attains its peers (Residential and Mobile IPs) through the Bright SDK, which is integrated into applications as another form of app monetization.

> App users are presented with the option to opt-in to the Bright Data Network and become a peer (share their device idle resources) in exchange for an ad-free or free application. All peers sharing resources with the Bright Data residential network have personally opted-in and may opt-out at any time.

It would be nice to know which applications have their SDK integrated, so I could avoid them.

[1]: https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/hk-en/security/news/cybercr...

[2]: https://brightdata.com/ethical

Some NordVPN clients turn your device into a proxy server which the other side of the NordVPN business (OxyLabs) sells to other customers.

Well that's concerning. What's the actual use case for this? It's certainly not priced to compete with traditional VPNs. Half tempted to install this on a machine as a honeypot and see what traffic comes through.

I don't think it's a hilarious bug in their logic, just collateral damage in the war between VPN providers and Disney/Netflix/etc. The VPN providers try to get IP ranges that look like residential IPs. Ideally they rent them from the same ISPs who really do provide residential service. By the nature of the traffic, Disney can't tell for sure that it's coming from a VPN - just something like "a suspiciously large number of users connected from this range, especially users who currently seem to be travelling internationally".

Perhaps the user had a dynamic IP address and kept getting one in the same range that was also used for VPNs. Perhaps he had a static one but Disney banned ranges by the /28 instead of individual addresses.

For anyone else who also read it as a big: the Disney+ user above torrented (most likely) the Disney content while not being a customer (a decision that was taken out of his hands).

I agree--they're not denying me their content, they're denying my payment. If this is really where they want to go, they know how it ends (read: someone disrupts their model and they get left in the dust).

There are companies who sell lists of suspected VPN IPs. If Disney+ and Netflix used the same list, you could get blocked from both.

Fun fact: the EU funded a study which ended up showing piracy has no effect on sales, then tried to bury it.

https://juliareda.eu/2017/09/secret-copyright-infringement-s...

There is a different incentive at play here. Netflix wants to track individuals. I wouldn't be surprised if some other agreement were behind this move, perhaps like other secret agreements:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/nsa-prism-cost...

>If Netflix can build a sophisticated VPN-detection service, copyright holders will be much less willing to license their content to upstarts who can't match its capabilities.

Have you missed the events of the last few years? Netflix's future competition isn't going to be scrappy startups, it's going to be content providers with their own streaming service.

This is a super interesting take and I wonder how closely this reflects Netflix's actual strategic thinking. If so it's an interesting game theory question, because the whole reason rightsholders would want this is to guarantee the value of splitting up distribution to multiple local distributors, most of whom would be well outside the realm of matching Netflix capabilities. But if those players can't match Netflix's DRM and thus rightsholders won't license to them, then all they are doing is giving Netflix is a discount for restricted rights without any additional profit.

> Not that I want to give them any ideas, but surely the best solution would be to just lock the account down to the region the billing account is from?

I'm pretty sure (based on dealing with DRM/geoIP restriction requirements in other spheres) that it's because the media companies are incredibly anal about enforcement on strict geographic lines. They don't care if your account is linked to a US credit card at a US billing address, despite how effective that is at ensuring that you are a US user (and how difficult it is to spoof). They are hellbent on the idea that no US-only content should ever be streamed to an IP address terminating at a non-US location. For them it's absolutely not about people or accounts - it's entirely a matter of geography.

Netflix could easily apply a rule based on the region of the billing account, and I am sure it would be vastly more effective than playing whack-a-mole with individual IP addresses. However, the media companies would undoubtedly still insist that they do strict geoIP restriction as well. And if Netflix did both, anybody who is traveling outside of their home country would find Netflix to be bereft of content; anyone who travelled frequently would find Netflix to be perfectly useless. By going all-in on geoIP, Netflix keeps the geoIP-fixated media companies happy, while ensuring that users see plenty of content even as they move from country to country.

I'd guess that Netflix is only upping their game on residential IPs etc now because the media companies are no longer happy and are leaning on them - VPN services are simply becoming too brazen about advertising the ability to bypass Netflix geo restrictions by clicking flags. Whenever it becomes this obvious to the media guys that anyone with a pulse and a credit card can circumvent Netflix's controls, they'll be pressed to 'do better' or lose their rights to content. Netflix takes some steps, catches some backlash, and the media companies are placated for a while.

I wouldn’t be surprised if these competing media conglomerates think Netflix is magic and are requiring they block these big Netflix-evading VPNs.

> Why should I have to jump through hoops just because I happen to be located abroad for a week?

I could easily see a gray market in, essentially, location-specific "rebilling" springing up the same day as this. Want to watch a show that's not available in your country? Sign up here for an account billed through an address that can watch that show, with a small convenience surcharge.

It's not obsolete because as a content producer the global players are not always willing to pay top dollar for your content. In many cases you can get more money by selling to multiple local players with single language, geo-restricted distribution rights. And this is the tip of the iceberg because you also have different types of rights for theatrical vs streaming distribution, and your strategy could interleave them in multiple non-intuitive ways.

Selling content for different prices in different markets:

- increases revenue

- relies on being able to separate those markets effectively

It's not obsolete, because it still works.

And it's not a historical accident resulting from past business models.

Content providers with no 'analogue' history also have geographical pricing. Example: Wes Bos' excellent JavaScript courses are priced differently depending on your country.

> Like, it possibly made some sense back when the stuff was actually broadcast via terrestrial TV to the given area

The majority of TV viewing is still via broadcast methods.

If you are using a VPN how do they know you aren't on vacation in Australia and are trying to watch shows that Netflix doesn't have the rights to in Australia.

I understand that this is about your location while streaming not while signing the contract.

Funny how ads might backfire this way!

I also like the theory that it helps Netflix collect data better. I'm sure both elements are at play.

Correct.

There's still plenty of georestrictions on Spotify. As an Aussie, I see heaps of songs on play lists that are greyed out.

The inflection point for Netflix's utility was when they removed the star ratings. It went from being an industry leader in catalog surfing to being one of the worst, seemingly overnight. They'd later make it difficult to narrow by genre, and similar catalog-hiding changes.

It was a shame. I found that I enjoyed interesting combinations like "Campy Science Fiction with a rating between 2 and 4". Now Netflix seems transfixed on shoving shitty daytime dating shows down my throat.

What's your stack for this? Do you use plex? I'm thinking about making the jump.

The Netflix logo on a poster is literally a stamp of bad quality. Like 90% of netflix originals are absolute trash.

This somewhat sounds like https://mubi.com/ or https://www.criterionchannel.com/?

Check out Youtube's Free with Ads movies. Seriously. They've got a good selection of great movies (especially comedies) from the 80s and 90s on there.

Naked Gun series, Oh Brother Where Art Thou?, Raising Arizona, Idiocracy, The Terminal, Major League, Top Secret!, Hot Shots!, Beavis and Butthead Do America, The Terminator, Delirious, Robin Hood Men in Tights, Captain Ron (crap, it's not free anymore), original Robocop, Secret of Nimh, Ghost, I'm Gonna Git You Sucka, Silence of the Lambs, Teen Wolf, to name a few.

It's a smaller selection and they don't seem to stay Free for more than a few months, so you have to keep checking it, but there's some good stuff on there.

I only use it because someone else lets me use their account for free. There's almost never anything worth watching on it though.

You make it sound like this is Netflix's fault, whereas tlit seems to me that 10 years ago it was mich easier to acquire licenses for streaming. now some of the big studios have their own streaming services, so licensing isich harder/impossible

Already did it, got lifetime emby premiere license, can watch whatever I want wherever I am, the ease of use and the low price were charming at the start, but I guess it was too good to last

You pay $90 a year to a Usenet provider, $15 a year to a Usenet indexer, and get gigabit+ download speeds of any TV show or Movie you want and they automatically get fetched via https://Sonarr.tv or https://Radarr.video

Plus it's all done over TLS and your ISP won't send you notices because you're not uploading/sharing anything.

When you strip away all the N-marked pulp, very little remains. Of these, very few titles merit being seen. I'm so weary of these I actually consider going back to buying movies as an alternative to renting (i.e. streaming).

Netflix has a subset of the content, and the subset differs on where they think you currently live.

There is no way to legally obtain all the content by paying.

They have the content... that you can obtain and host (or pay someone to host via a Plex Share). Piracy is back, and getting more convenient by the day.

Bittorrent has the most content.

Plex is a media server mainly used for serving downloaded content, so I'll let you make of that what you will. Piracy has not gotten harder in the past 20 years. In many countries it is de facto legal.

At least some 'Netflix originals' are released on Bluray.

I agree that TV rights are a complicated business problem. But Youtube TV managed to solve it in a way that doesn't just break for some bizarre technical reason most TV viewers don't understand.

The blackouts aren't based on geography, they're based on media markets. A game is blacked out if it can be watched on cable, basically.

Or a GOG-like service for movies and shows.