While browsing a website with YouTube videos, as well as others, such as Dailymotion, we may come across a message that the video has not been made available in our country. How to bypass this blockade and why do we encounter it?
Messages of this type have been appearing since the beginning of the 20th century and their reasons are different:
- licensing restrictions, i.e. the American sports channel is not allowed to broadcast a sports event outside the US
- the filmmaker’s own choice, e.g. youtuber may not want his production to be played from the territory of selected countries
- video services like youtube or VOD (video on demand) may block videos in selected countries due to the law in force there
The websites recognize our location through our IP address, which is publicly visible to every website we connect to via the Internet. Regional restrictions for movies exist in UK, Germany, Australia, but also in many other countries, e.g. when traveling abroad, entering Netflix, we may have access to a different, both limited and extended library of available movies and series.
Examples of video service messages if the material is blocked due to regional restrictions:
- This video is not available in your country – Youtube
- This video is not available – Youtube
- The uploader did not make this video available in your country – Youtube
- This video is currently not available to view at your location – Amazon Prime Video
- We’re sorry. This site is not available in your region. (Sorry. This page is not available in your region.) – Discovery
- “This video is not available in your location” – Twitter
- The video is not available at the moment – Bilibili
- BBC iPlayer only works in the UK. Sorry, it’s due to rights issues. (BBC iPlayer only works in UK territory. Sorry, that’s for licensing rights reasons. – BBC iPlayer
- Rakuten TV is not available in your country – Rakuten.tv
The easiest and most effective way to unblock a video is to change the IP address of our device. Through the IP, the server of the website we connect to recognizes our location and the country where we are physically located.
In order to bypass this, we can change the IP through the VPN service, which will temporarily replace our IP address with one from virtually any other country that we choose. This way, we can watch the blocked video on any platform. One great VPN is NordVPN.
What VPN should I use for Internet video streaming? Both free and paid VPNs will work, but the free ones have significant transfer limits and a limited number of locations (countries) through which we can connect and change our IP address. Some of the best VPNs for video streaming are listed below. They will work for unblocking a movie on Youtube, as well as for BBC iPlayer or Discovery.
