Is that it?: Netflix hopes its local offering won't underwhelm Australians when it arrives here officially in March. Credit:Bloomberg "So they shouldn't look at it as, 'This is what you get at Netflix?' when they look at the catalogue on day one. They should look at, 'Wow! This is what I get now, and that thing is just going to keep growing and getting better and better'." Then, it was 'quality, not quantity', with Mr Yellin throwing back to Netflix's ongoing battle with Blockbuster for the biggest DVD catalogue, back when it was "an ancient silver disc company". "It was ridiculous because what we were doing - and what they were doing - was getting up the pick-up truck and getting every ridiculous right to every piece of crap you could license, and dump them onto the service, and that was meaningless," Mr Yellin said. "You want to have a nice breadth and a good volume of titles but you don't want to have, like, 'Mine is bigger than yours' … It really is about the quality in the end. Sorry to be so cagey."

A third deflection came when Mr Yellen argued distribution rights across the world were constantly in flux, and therefore each market had advantages over others at any one time, but that ultimately the Netflix product experience remained equal. "It's not like one's better than the other," he said. "There's a big overlap, but look at it like a Venn diagram: there's some stuff better about this one, and some stuff better about that one." It doesn't take a genius to figure out the Australian Netflix catalogue is likely to be smaller than the US one at launch. Netflix owns the global rights for its original productions, such as Marco Polo and Orange is the New Black.

But home-grown players such as Foxtel already own the local distribution rights to some of our favourite content, including Game of Thrones. Geo-dodgers Meanwhile, Mr Yellin hosed down claims that some 200,000 Australians were bypassing "geoblocks" and accessing the US version of Netflix using virtual private networks - tools that make it appear as though you are in another country. "We think the rumours are a little exaggerated because no one really knows," he said. "We'd be curious ourselves." The comments follow reports at the weekend suggesting Australians' access to the US version of Netflix could soon be cut off, with VPN services reportedly beginning to block subscribers who use tools that bypass geolocation restrictions.

Despite this, Netflix said there had been "no change" recently to the way it handled VPNs. Regardless, Netflix has issued statements in the past saying using a VPN is against its terms of service. "Virtually crossing borders to use Netflix is a violation of our terms of use because of content licensing restrictions," the company has said. "We employ industry standard measures to prevent this kind of use. We have not recently made any changes." But a leaked document obtained by TorrentFeak showed a draft of a content protection agreement Sony Pictures Entertainment prepared for Netflix earlier last year, which required the streaming giant to verify that registered users were where they said they were.

Netflix must "use such geolocation bypass detection technology to detect known web proxies, DNS-based proxies, anonymising services and VPNs which have been created for the primary intent of bypassing geo-restrictions", the document, posted on the publication's website, stated. If it didn't accept this, it is assumed Sony wouldn't give it the rights to its content. Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull has said previously the use of VPNs to bypass geoblocks was not illegal. "While content providers often have in place international commercial arrangements to protect copyright in different countries or regions, which can result in 'geoblocking', circumventing this is not illegal under the Copyright Act," he said in December. Mr Yellin said ultimately Netflix's goal was to eliminate regional rights arrangements altogether and create a "global Netflix, in terms of rights".

"Already changes are being made with deals we've made with the studios, and with our own content," Mr Yellin said. "To be entirely changed, that will take years. I don't know if that's four years, or seven years, and I'm not qualified to answer that question." Technology blog Gizmodo reported that before it was allowed to sit down at a Neflix briefing at CES, a spokesperson came out and asked it "not to discuss the VPN issue" with representatives because the story was "wrong". with Ben Grubb Hannah Francis travelled to CES as a guest of Samsung