Bangalore, January 18 2016: Irony:  the top rated Netflix offering is a TV series it  owns and produces -- House of Cards. Yet you will search in vain for it if you are an India-based subscriber. Why? Because Netflix  has  sold India rights of the serial to the Zee TV group. Such  are the hassles  of region-centric global  Video onDemand.

There is a way to get around such corralling.  Proxmate, is a UK-origin  browser plugin that lets users easily access geo-restricted content like Netflix, Hulu, Pandora and the BBC. For example a user in India can watch  the large Netflix repertoire  from the US using Proxmate, They can also access a lot of free TV programming from NBC, CBS, Spotify etc  including TV serial archives  etc that would not be  otherwise available from India. It  used to be free, but now it costs about a dollar a month ( Rs 67 equivalent)   or $ 10( Rs 670)  a year. Services  like Proxmate  uses proxy servers  to get around such regional barriers.

Over the weekend, Netflix was quoted  by wire services saying  it will prevent Virtual Private Networks or proxy users from circumventing country-based content licensing restrictions. In a January 14 blog post, Netflix VP  for Content Delivery Architecture David Fullagar,  said: "If all of our content were globally available, there wouldn’t be a reason for members to use proxies or “unblockers” .... We are making progress in licensing content across the world... but we have a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere.