Originally Posted by
thegasguru
What difference does this make? Are you saying that the vpn providers you've tried do not let you successfully stream Netflix when travelling overseas?
The server knows from your IP address that you are proxying. The reason? Commercial VPN services are run from data centers (not households), and the IPs are listed as such.
VPN providers themselves only care to the extent that you would over-consume bandwidth, but at the same time they don't want to lose clients, so they allow it.
The question is, does the *server* care if you're tunneling? Netflix would probably love to serve the whole world. They don't want to discriminate on IPs. But the copyright holders Netflix has agreements with
do care about this (for the same reason that you have region specific DVDs). So Netflix is being contractually forced to refuse overseas IP addresses. Netflix obviously does not want to block tunnelers.
The question then becomes: why are the copyright holders not forcing Netflix to block tunnelers? Either it's cost prohibitive to cut off a few people slipping through the cracks, or they're getting business from customers who stream things to large offices with non-residential IPs and don't want to give that up.
So strictly for Netflix, VPNs may work, at the moment. It depends on what you're doing. Try shopping abroad, and using the tunnel to simulate using your credit card from your home country - it will be a different experience.