Travel the World with your Content

If you have ever tried to watch ABC programs online from another country, you would know what it means to be geo-blocked. The same applies to Netflix Australia, Amazon Prime and other Video-on-Demand services.

But this no longer need be the case. Not if you have a VPN or Virtual Private Network.

What is a VPN?

Normally, when you want to access a site, you type in the URL into the address bar of your browser. Your browser then connects to the internet through your Internet Service Provider. It is your Internet Service Provider or ISP that assigns your computer or mobile device an IP address and the web server (if you typed in www.netflix.com/au, the corresponding web server would be that of Netflix) answering your access request determines your geographic location based on your IP address. This is how it figures out whether or not you are in Australia at the moment, and serves up content that is permitted for your region.

With a VPN, a server is placed between you and the web server. This server (also called VPN server) appends its own IP address to the web content access request before forwarding it to the web server. Because only one IP address can be associated with a particular request, the web server sees that of the VPN server, not your actual IP address. If the VPN server is located in Australia, the web server determines the location of the request to be from within the country, and grants access accordingly. So this is how you can view video content outside Australia without getting geo-blocked.

There is more. With a VPN, you can also choose which geographic location you want the web server to think you are in. You could be in Australia and still watch HBO’s Game of Thrones from its U.S. site while being Down Under.

Do I need to subscribe to two VPN services, one for watching ABC content outside Australia and another for viewing U.S. content in Australia?
This is the great part – only one will do. VPNs tend to have servers around the world, so you could choose from one among them each time you want to watch something.

You also need not worry about getting into legal trouble – VPNs do not maintain any logs of which sites you visited or what you did online. So with a VPN, you are protected; and you need not ever worry about being geo-blocked again. Now you can travel the whole world with your online content!