It is incredible how life changes in an instant. We do not like to think of accidents and how they can cause changes in an instant, but causes can also be changed by other happenings.
In lots of nations Uber has caused trouble for the normal Taxi drivers. The taxi drivers did not expect this to happen, and the big change and trouble caused by this is something they simply has to cope with. The same can be said about SmartDNS providers who smiled and earned lots of money for a long time. The main focus of most SmartDNS providers was to help its users easily change between different Netflix regions, but everything changed on January 6th in 2016.
On January 6th in 2016 Netflix launched their services in almost all nations of the world. This impacted the SmartDNS companies in one way at first.
- With Netflix available in all nations people no longer needed to use a SmartDNS provider in order to access Netflix, since the service could now be reached in their country without any additional service.
But, the SmartDNS services knew that most people will not be satisfied with what their local Netflix has to offer, and that is why they kept their services up and running so that people easily could change from their local Netflix to for example US Netflix. This worked well for most providers for a couple of months, but then Netflix stepped up.
Netflix did a manual attack on the VPN providers and SmartDNS providers on the market. They manually stepped in and discovered the IP addresses in use by these providers, and then they blocked them. Most people in the market expected this to be a one time event (including us), but we were wrong. As the SmartDNS providers noticed that their services did not work anymore, they got hold of new servers, new IP addresses and tried new methods. Some of them worked for a day or two, or maybe even a week or a month, but then Netflix returned and blocked those services as well. Due to this some SmartDNS providers have decided to terminate their services in total, while others have stopped trying to get Netflix work, and instead they focus on all the other services they provide and that still work.
For Netflix to make things even worse
If you a Windows or Mac user you might not notice this, but if you use the Netflix application on your Android device, on your iPhone/iPad, or maybe use the Netflix application for Apple TV, Fire TV, Roku or so on, then Netflix is using these to make it even harder to change your Netflix region. Yesterday we did a big test on some of the SmartDNS providers that actually work (partly) with Netflix, but we could still not get them working anywhere else than in Windows (and on Mac). The reason is simply.
- Netflix has added lots of extra code in the Netflix application that force the application to use either Google DNS servers or Netflix DNS servers. The DNS servers provided by your SmartDNS provider will automatically be overrided by the ones the Netflix application forces you to use. You can of course block the Google DNS servers and Netflix DNS servers manually on your router, but it seems to us as if Netflix has a block in their application which wan’t let your watch their content if all the mentioned DNS servers they want you to use are blocked. In other words – THE END for SmartDNS providers that aim to help you reach other Netflix regions using the Netflix application on any device.
It seems as if Netflix adds lots of stuff in their application, because at the moment it seems hard to combine the usage of a VPN and the Netflix application as well.
Where will this lead? How will this end? Time will show!
