One of life’s greatest pleasures is about the get whole lot better thanks to a new ruling within the European Union that will allow all European residents to stream all of what Netflix has to offer which means more movies and TV shows for everyone – good news if you’ve already watched pretty much all of your favourite shows and movies already.
Although Netflix is available all over the world the platform does place certain restrictions on what its users can watch based on where they are watching from. This is often because the country you are streaming from isn’t able to obtain the license or rights for that content.
After discussing the future of streaming the European Union decided that because more than 50% of Europeans stream music or watch movies online that their legislation regarding streamable content needed to change. The change will likely be enforced using a law that would stop content streamers like Netflix using a customers IP address in order to determine their location and then set restrictions on the content that’s available to them, therefore making the entire Netflix library available to them no matter what country they’re in.
In order for this new legislation to be put in place it first needs to get formal approval from the Legal Affairs Committee, Parliament and the European Council. The change would also work both ways as at the moment UK residents are not able to use streaming services such as BBC iPlayer outside of the UK however the new legislation would likely allow it whilst also opening up all of Netflix’s library. Quite how this will pan out isn’t clear, but we can only hope.
