Made the jump to American Netflix

I got Netflix a while ago. I knew at the time that the content for their Canadian offering was lacking, especially as compared to their American selection. Nevertheless, the subscription cost was reasonable enough to warrant keeping the service. Last week, I registered with a service that lets me get content available to US residents. It was a change for the amazing, one that I should have done long before.

Netflix provides its subscribers with different content based on where it thinks they’re surfing from. If it thinks you’re browsing from the States, it will provide you with their American selection. If it thinks you’re in Canada, the Canadian content will appear.

How it knows where you are is by way of your computer’s Internet or IP address. It uses a geolocation service to tie that address a physical location. It’s imperfect, because these addresses aren’t structured according to physical location, but according to the topology of how computers are interconnected. To show you just how different the two are, here’s what a map of the Internet:

Anyways, this means that if your traffic to Netflix appears to be coming from a different IP address, say one that’s in the United-States, then Netflix will think you’re American. There’s a few ways to change where you appear to be coming from.

One is to use a VPN, whereby all of Internet traffic gets routed through computers located somewhere else – in this case, the United-States. Netflix would see that traffic as originating from an American IP, unaware of the Canadian source. An account with a VPN provider would cost about $10 a month.

Another approach is to change the DNS servers to those of a special service provider. Think of DNS servers as a phone book for the Internet. It translates domain names like “netflix.com” (phone book analogy: people’s names) to IP addresses like “255.255.255.255” where the content is actually found (phone book analogy: phone numbers). So just as mucking around with the phone numbers in a phone book could have someone who intended to call one person call another, DNS servers can likewise misdirect a computer.

This service uses this ability to trick a computer into talking to the wrong servers when it wants to reach Netflix. The servers it gets pointed to are owned by the service provider and based in the US. They act as relays, passing the traffic over to Netflix on behalf of the computer. Netflix meanwhile only sees these proxies with American IP addresses, and so feeds content intended for US residents. This approach has much lighter bandwidth requirements than a VPN provider, and likewise costs less at $5/month. This is what I went for.

The difference between American and Canadian Netflix content is staggering. Below is an image of the latest additions to Netflix. What’s in black is content only available to Americans. The little that’s left isn’t very impressive.

I had a hard time recommending Netflix outright before. Now I’d say yes, it’s absolutely worth it if you don’t have cable, but only if you’re able to get the American selection.