Recently a growing number of services have been cracking down on the use of VPNs to get around geographic limitations. Now NBA League Pass has also started to crack down on the use of VPNs.
Over the last week, we have been hearing a growing number of reports from people saying that their VPN provider has been blocked. This means they are using a VPN to access content on they shouldn’t typically get access to because of geographical limitations.
Fights like this are always a game of whack-a-mole. Netflix recently went all-in on blocking VPNs to keep geographical limitations in place. But so far Netflix has had mixed results in its efforts to block VPNs since the VPN owners do their best to change IPs to make it more difficult for Netflix and others to block their services.
So why do streaming services like NBA League Pass and Netflix care if someone is watching their show outside of the designated area? In short, Netflix and others only have rights to the content streamed in the US for the US. They have contracts that compel them to do what they can to block people who don’t have rights to the content. This is because content owners want to sell content rights to countries in each market. If everyone got access to their content from the US-based Netflix, that would make the content less valuable to sell in places like Europe, for example.
As streaming becomes more popular, we can expect Netflix and other streaming services to continue to crack down on VPNs.
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