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I live in Canada and have a Netflix subscription that works fine for me. This week I'm in Poland and today I launched my Netflix client to show someone a show I thought they would like. To my great surprise, I was told Netflix was not available in my region. Bummer.

On this trip, there has been no time for TV anyway. But I imagine I might want it on a future trip. Using remote desktop to access a machine at home and watch something doesn't seem like a good workaround - we don't have that kind of outbound bandwidth for one thing. So how is this done?

Kate Gregory
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  • A tip I got from @Andra a while ago is to use a VPN or a DNS service, it is called unotelly. We had a chat about this, anyway a better place for this question would be Superuser.SE(??) or other technical site as it is more into networking than travel, in my opinion. – Nean Der Thal Oct 17 '14 at 19:20
  • This question appears to be off-topic because it is about circumventing the law – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 19:33
  • I'm pretty sure this sort of question has come up before, and always been closed as off-topic for trying to circumvent the law. – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 19:34
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    @Flimzy I do not agree on the "circumventing the law" part. – Nean Der Thal Oct 17 '14 at 19:41
  • @MeNoTalk: Netflix licenses its content in certain countries and not in others. Circumventing your contractual agreement with Netflix is law-circumvention. It wouldn't likely land you in criminal court, but it could land you in civil court if you were caught. – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 19:42
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    there is no law that says I can't use Netflix here. Perhaps Netflix doesn't want to have Polish customers, but I have a paid-for subscription from home and want to use it while I travel. This is different from the situation of a non traveler (for example, I have machines at home that could be involved in the process, and I am already a legal subscriber to the service.) – Kate Gregory Oct 17 '14 at 19:44
  • @Flimzy I disagree.. I am willing to pay money to watch all the TV shows I like legally, but because of these licenses I was not able to watch it legally, so they left me with no option but to watch it my way.. I disagree.. – Nean Der Thal Oct 17 '14 at 19:44
  • @KateGregory: Sure there is. It's copyright law. Netflix licenses its content from the content owners. The content owners own the copyright, and they grant Netflix limited permission to distribute their content within certain areas. Netflix is not legally authorized to distribute the content in other areas. By circumventing their geographic restrictions you are circumventing copyright law enforcement. It's essentially the same as using bit torrent or other file sharing methods to retrieve content for which you are not a licensed viewer. – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 19:45
  • @MeNoTalk: You are welcome to disagree, but that doesn't change the law. – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 19:45
  • @Flimzy let them sue Torrent, for me they discriminate audience to the point that I can't watch legally, I will use torrent and other services as I see fit. That's my way of disagreeing ;) – Nean Der Thal Oct 17 '14 at 19:46
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    @MeNoTalk: I'm not telling you not to use bit torrent. I'm illegally downloading things right now with bit torrent. I'm only saying that this question is thus off-topic here. I also circumvent geographic content restrictions occasionally, when I feel the need. But I don't ask about how to do these things on SE :) – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 19:47
  • @Flimzy I considered asking on SU but believe the larger audience there would in fact answer "I live in X; how can I access geo blocked services there?" which is not the same question. For example things that take weeks to set up aren't worth it so I can watch a little TV one night on a one week trip but might seem like a great plan to someone living where local TV doesn't meet their tastes. – Kate Gregory Oct 17 '14 at 19:53
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    This question appears to be off-topic because it is about networking – Nean Der Thal Oct 17 '14 at 20:16
  • I found the other question I was thinking of. It was actually on expatriates. It's a little different, but discusses some of the legal implications of what you're trying to do. – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 21:29
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    Here is an explanation of why it is illegal to do this in Australia. Similar legal restrictions are likely to exist in most countries. – Flimzy Oct 17 '14 at 22:06
  • Similarly, I think BBC iPlayer gets blocked outside the United Kingdom. – sks Oct 17 '14 at 22:09

1 Answers1

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The short answer is, you can't. If you're in Poland, you'll be connecting to the Internet through an IP address known to correspond to Poland, and this is what services what Netflix use to geolocate where you are and block accordingly.

What you can do, though, is proxy your traffic: you send it all over to another machine in your target country, in this case Canada, and that machine forwards it. Netflix then sees the traffic as coming from Canada, and lets you in.

The best solution is a private proxy, eg. a desktop machine you've left running at home (which you obviously have to set up and test before you leave!), or a corporate VPN. There are also a whole bunch of companies that will sell you access to their proxies. Last and least, there are also some completely free proxies out there, but these tend to be overloaded, slow, and they often get banned by websites since people use them for various nefarious things. Since all there change all the time, here's a semi-randomly chosen website that covers all four options and how to find out more about each.

Regardless of what option you choose, it will slow down your Net access considerably and make most sorts of streaming impossible, since everything has to be sent over a long-distance connection. Usually, if you connect to Netflix, it will already have cached all the content nearby so it's fast to get, but if Netflix thinks you're in Canada, it's going to serve you your videos from a cache in Canada, not the one that would be fastest for Poland.

As for copyright & legality issues, I'm not a lawyer & Travel.SE does not provide legal advice yadda yadda, but the long and short of it is that as a paying Canadian subscriber of Netflix Canada, Kate is perfectly authorized to view content on Netflix Canada. Now it may well be against Netflix's contract with the copyright holders to allow such content to be streamed and/or cached overseas, but that's not really her problem, nor is it "illegal", only a breach of contract. Here's an interesting article on the topic (h/t Flimzy) by a law professor, but note that it's talking about subscribing under a false address, so much of it does not apply in this case.

lambshaanxy
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