Netflix wants to break down US, UK and other restrictions and make content the same all around the world

A global Netflix would rely on ground-breaking international licensing deals

(Netflix)

Until now, the answer to VPN and proxy piracy has been to attempt to block it in a digital game of whack-a-mole, but Netflix has come up with a better solution - just break down the international barriers and render it obsolete.

In news that will hugely excite UK subscribers trying to watch Friends on Netflix US or US subscribers struggling to watch Breaking Bad on Netflix UK, CEO Reed Hastings confirmed that universal content is the company's goal.

"The VPN thing is a small little asterisk compared to piracy," Hastings noted. "Piracy is really the problem around the world."

He recognised that people are willing to pay the subscription fee, and are only being driven to use international workarounds to access the content they want.

“The basic solution is for Netflix to get global and have its content be the same all around the world so there’s no incentive to [use a VPN]," he explained. "Then we can work on the more important part which is piracy.

"The key thing about piracy is that some fraction of it is because [users] couldn’t get the content. That part we can fix.

"Some part of piracy however is because they just don’t want to pay. That’s a harder part. As an industry, we need to fix global content."

Netflix Global is surely a long way down the road however. The service's content is so segregated precisely because of how strict international licensing agreements are. For it to happen, Hollywood would need to be ready to forge ground-breaking global licensing deals.