Bell Media President Mary Ann Turcke says watching U.S. Netflix in Canada by using VPNs is stealing. She said it should be frowned upon. At the Telecom Summit in Toronto, Turcke said “It has to become socially unacceptable to admit to another human being that you are VPNing into U.S. Netflix … like throwing garbage out your car window — you just don’t do it.”
Netflix is a video streaming service that offers customer access to a list of content based on their location which is determined by your device’s IP address. Netflix’s U.S. catalogue offers more and better content compared to the Canadian catalogue. With Virtual Private Network (VPN), Canadians can fiddle with their IP address to access the U.S. catalogue instead.
Turcke, as the head of Canada’s largest media company, finds herself at the forefront of the piracy debate. Still confident of the industry’s future, she said “Delighting Canadians means making it easy to find great content — on any screen — anywhere. Just make it easy. Viewers are demanding simplicity, and they will seek it out.”