Margrethe Vestager, the EU anti-trust commissioner, is making a point, and it could cost streaming content providers billions of Euros. According to the International Business Times, Vestager feels that licensing for content should apply to the European Union as one entity, not 28 individual countries. She wants content she paid for in one EU country, to be available in other EU countries as well, so she is bringing a lawsuit.
Though the EU is supposed to be considered as one trading bloc, the big studios are licensing content per country. The targets of this suit are companies like Sky, Walt Disney, NBCUniversal, Paramount Pictures, Sony, 20th Century Fox et al. If this suit is successful, it could set an interesting precedent in licensing protocol across the board. As of this point, a user is limited to whatever rights the country holds, and if they travel to another region, they will encounter geo-restrictions if they try to view the same content.
Restrictions like that are standard operating procedure. That is why you may not view programming outside of a specific country, unless you use something like a SmartDNS service. A Smart DNS will alter the DNS settings on the device you are using, therefore you could still watch the same content from any country. The issue that Vestager is solving could be resolved by using this method. That would also be true if you were located outside of the EU.
If you are interested, the service would work to switch between different regions of Netflix as well. You may have seen the news about Netflix wanting to crack down on location changing proxies. Since SmartDNS only changes your settings, those restrictions may be easily circumvented with a minimal amount of setup. Please have a look at our top SmartDNS service list located on the right, to get started today.
