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Has Netflix officially won its war on VPNs?

Netflix has been incredibly bullish in its crackdown on subscribers using geo-unblocking services to watch content outside their regions.

It seems that while these services have been trying their best to circumvent Netflix’s security measures, the streaming media site may have ultimately won the battle.

Over the last couple of months Netflix has been very successful in stopping geo-unblockers from bypassing the streaming service’s regional offerings, to the point where services like Borderless Internet has thrown in the towel.

“As clever as we try to be, I would be hard pressed to guarantee anything regarding Netflix going forward. In the last few months we have seen them block ISPs, Backbone providers, DataCenters, AWS, MS, Google, and thousands of normal hosting providers,” Borderless Internet explained in a Reddit post.

The company added that others services have also stopped supporting Netflix in their VPN or geo-unblocking services. “Several other ‘smart DNS’ providers have recently thrown in the towel as they can’t keep working servers up for more than a few hours in some cases.”

In June we wrote about how Borderless Internet was knocked out by Netflix.

“Quick update to let everyone know that Netflix has pushed out a new anti geo-relocation system today. All of our regions will currently present a proxy error with Netflix,” Borderless Internet said in a statement.

UnoTelly has had support issues for a number of months now. But while Borderless Internet is still going on regardless of not being able to provide geo-unblocking for the streaming service, one service had to close down because of it – ViperDNS.

“It is with great regret that we have to close down ViperDNS effective immediately. We’ve done our very best to find a solution for this but it’s simply not possible. In short: Netflix has won,” it said on its website a couple of days ago.

ViperDNS’ Facebook page and Twitter account has also been yanked offline.

If the service continues with its aggressive push against geo-unblocking services, soon users will have no choice than to be satisfied with the content available in their region. When one considers how little they enjoy compared their US counterparts, Netflix may seem less attractive than before.

While Netflix is trying to do the “right thing” for content publishers and rights holders, it might also be shooting itself in the foot.

Since the service launched globally in January, it has only added 35 000 new users per region. It also doesn’t help that the service has increased its subscription price by $2 – and the company itself is expecting to lose up to 500 000 subscribers this year alone.

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