After several years, Netflix finally made it to India. while I was initially carried away by the move, after playing around with Netflix here, it dawned upon me that a staggering number of titles didn’t make it to India. After searching for several TV shows on Netflix, I was surrounded by a cloud of disappointment. Most of the famous American shows like Lost and Californication were excluded from the Indian Netflix and this just made the deal go sour. Same is the case if you are accessing Netflix anywhere outside of US.
Earlier, most of us were accessing Netflix by using a VPN and this way we could enjoy all the content served in the US or UK. While we can still continue to do so, here is a more effortless and effective way of accessing the global catalogue. Smartflix.io is a service which unlocks ALL the content on Netflix, irrespective of the country you reside in. The app is still in beta and as of now it is free, but once it exits beta, users will be charged a onetime fee of $7.99.
Accessing Netflix from a third party app with unlocked content doesn’t seem to be legit, infact it is quite possible that Netflix might ban Smartflix very soon. Smartflix comes in the form of a .exe file for the Windows and it needs to be installed just like any other program. Once installed, the app asks you to enter the Netflix credentials and once verified it logs in, and again this particular step could compromise your account details.
The app itself works pretty much like Netflix except for the fact that it currently works only on Mac and Windows systems. The overall viewing experience is slightly diluted as the service doesn’t offer subtitles, content in HD and also you need to ensure that the proxy port on your connection is not blocked. In my case, the anti-virus made it impossible to install Smartflix and had to turn of the same to install.
The bottom line is that viewers have been openly using VPN (or services like Unlocator) to bypass Netflix’s geo restrictions with no real restrictions, but Smartflix seems to cash in on that by offering an even simpler way. On the other hand, I just hope that services like this will not push Netflix to ban the VPN/proxy users just like Hulu and others did. If you are desperate to stream the global content and don’t mind using a third party service for the same, then Smartflix will make sense, else stick to VPN or local content.