By Nick Broughall
What TV looks like in America, where internet services let you watch what you want, when you want. Picture courtesy Hulu
- Americans watch loads of telly
- They watch it free, on computers
IMAGINE a world where you could legally and freely watch any episode of any TV show ever made.
A world where you could stream high-definition movies to your television for a couple of dollars a week, with an almost unlimited selection to choose from.
Customers in the US can almost experience this right now through internet services like Hulu and Netflix.
Hulu offers over 1000 seasons of television programming with more than 29,000 episodes available for free with a few minor advertisements, or $US8 a month for even more content.
Meanwhile, Netflix users pay $US8 a month to stream as many movies as they want as many times as they want.
But thanks to copyright law, anyone living outside of the US is blocked from using these amazing services.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to get around this restriction by using a commonplace technology called VPN.
VPN stands for virtual private network.
It’s most commonly used by businesses to let employees remotely connect to the company network without compromising security.
But it can also be used to convince overseas websites that you are in a country that has access to its services.
Here’s how it works: you set up your computer with either a free or paid VPN service and, once activated, point your computer’s browser at the Hulu or Netflix website.
The services you previously couldn’t access will now be available to you. It's as simple as that.
There are, however, a few downsides.
Firstly, VPNs can be slow. If your internet connection isn’t fast enough, you could find streaming video continually stopping to buffer, which would make the whole process more effort than it’s worth.
The second issue is that Hulu and Netflix know all about VPNs, and many popular VPN services are actually blocked by these sites.
Quite often this can be overcome by stopping your VPN and starting again, though.
The third issue is how you get the geo-restricted content onto your television.
Screen-sharing devices like the McTiVia, which bundles VPN software with each $299 purchase, encourage Australians to access Hulu on the big screen, but it's a substantial investment.
The other alternative is good, old-fashioned cables.
NOTE: The legality of using VPNs to access international entertainment services is debatable - copyright campaigners will argue it's illegal, but under Australian parallel import law it's not.
However, using VPNs to access services from Hulu or Netflix definitely contradicts each companies terms of service, although like the conditions attached to iTunes, they aren't necessarily enforceable by law.
So here's our list of the top five VPN Clients:
HotSpot Shield, (free)
Hotspot Shield is one of the most attractive VPN services on the market. It’s free, and it’s incredibly simple to setup. Simply download and install the software, and it will do the rest of the hard work for you.
Hulu does recognise computers using it though, so you might need to try a few times to get it to work for you.
Link to Hotspot Shield
0 comments:
Post a Comment