Costa Rica

Julie and I are in Costa Rica, experiencing a seesaw of hospitality. As is usual with the pecking order at very touristy hotels, management and maids/service staff are great; bartenders on the flip side act like they own the place. I'm excited to be able to watch the master's here, albeit after the champion's league match...

We don't have a TV in our room but I figured since we have wireless Internet access that we would be able to watch old survivor episodes to catch up or, at a minimum, use Netflix 'Watch Instantly' to get some late night sleep aid in. No such luck. Geoblocking of FOX or CBS programming I understand because of broadcast tv restrictions (well... I really don't understand that, but whatever).

Netflix blocking us because we are outside of the 50 states must be because of a dearth of CDN providers that would render the service unusable. Performance implications from network latency due to serving from, say San Jose or Ciudad de Panama, would either cause you to buffer FOREVER or pause all the time (to rebuffer). Maybe Peer-to-Peer at a mid-tier level (local [1-2 sq m] cache) would work. I can see a lot of folks wanting to see some of the same movies here. I'd pay $5-10/nt extra for that service. Anyway, it'll be local video rental or my swimup bar view (with the only TV in the house) until that happens...