The Netflix CEO, Hastings Reed, has come out saying that the number of people who are talking about the company’s crackdown on VPNs’ are nothing but a small minority.
“It’s a very small but quite vocal minority,” said the Mr. Reed of the international users who try to access US content through the use of virtual private networks. “It is really inconsequential to us,” he goes on to say.
Virtual Private Networks help to mask the real location of where a person is allowing to circumvent certain ‘geo-restrictions’.
The whole issue is about users who are outside the US border who use the service of Virtual Private Networks to access US content. The US content contains more shows and movies compared to any other store. Most of the affected VPN users have threatened to completely boycott the service if Netflix continued with its extensive ban on VPNs. Others also threatened to go on and use piracy if they could not find the content they wanted on the Netflix accounts. The Netflix doesn’t seem to be bothered, however.
Netflix Subscribers, Q1 (millions):
2016: 81.50M
2015: 62.27M
2014: 48.35M
2013: 36.31M
2012: 26.48M
2011: 23.60M— Jon Erlichman (@JonErlichman) April 18, 2016
“Hulu is doing some great work; Amazon is; HBO; Showtime,” he said. “There are so many competitors and everyone is working hard to build the best content. We are seeing growth in the overall internet TV market that is displacing linear TV, so it’s natural that everybody is coming in as they realize that the future is internet TV.”
Mr. Hastings, however, is just concerned about increasing the number of Netflix subscribers rather than worry about those who are moaning about the ban on VPN use.
The company’s executives wrote in a letter to the shareholders that, “We are but a little boat in a vast sea, We earn a tiny fraction of consumers’ time and money, and have lots of opportunities ahead to win more of your evenings away from all those other activities if we keep improving.”