Streaming UK tv on a US Roku
Community Forums/General Help/Streaming UK tv on a US Roku
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| So... I just got a Roku device recently, and have been quite enjoying it for Netflix and such, but there are a few shows on the UK version of Amazon Prime that I would love to watch over here in the U.S. I'm guessing I need to do something with my ip address, to make Amazon think that I'm in the UK, but I'm a bit clueless. Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Cheers! |
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| Only way to do that is by redirecting your traffic over a VPN in a different country, which is not easy to do for embedded devices.. Unless you have a router that supports outgoing VPN tunnels and that can selectively route traffic there. If you watch on a computer it's much easier to manually connect to a VPN first. With the VPN you essentially tunnel your entire internet connection to an endpoint in a different country, so it looks like you're coming from the UK, or US, or Australia, etc. And of course you'll have to pay a VPN service for their effort as well, they have to pay their bandwidth bill as well. Even then, it's a losing battle: most of the content providers such as netflix are continuously blocking known VPN service provider ranges to prevent streaming from out of their service area in order to satisfy the demands put on them from their content providers. (Without those regional blocks they would need to get a worldwide broadcasting license, which is either a LOT more expensive, or impossible due to exclusive deals with other companies in certain regions) And even if you COULD use the VPN to appear like you're in a particular country, you still may not be able to get the content that you want because many of the content providers won't accept payment by a creditcard that was issued in a non-allowed country. (e.g. a British content provider may not give you access to video if you pay with a US creditcard -- and vice-versa.) It sucks, but unfortunately there's a lot of companies making a lot of money by actively refusing to sell you what you want to buy. :-? |
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| Steaming via a PC, using Chrome + Free VPN - Hola Extension, allows me to grab U.S. Netflix. Not quite what your looking for but it's a free option. |
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| Ian Thompson (Posted 1 hour ago) #3 Steaming via a PC, using Chrome + Free VPN - Hola Extension, allows me to grab U.S. Netflix. Not quite what your looking for but it's a free option. FYI: http://lifehacker.com/hola-better-internet-sells-your-bandwidth-turning-its-1707496872 Using hola (and may of the other free VPNs) means that you agree to share your own internet connection with others as well. That's how they have endpoints all over the world: traffic gets tunneled from your PC to some random other users in the country you want to appear to be from. The big downside: you have no control over who uses your connection. If they are doing shady things (pirating movies, downloading child porn, hacking government or banking networks, running a botnet, conspiring terrorist activities, whatever) then to the receiving end it looks like those illegal activities originated at YOUR IP address. Even if you personally had no direct involvement, do you really want to get tangled up into who-knows what kind of affairs where step #1 for law enforcement is to confiscate all your computer equipment while they investigate? |
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| Yup, I am aware of this, and I disable the Chrome extension if I'm not watching NetFlix. I personally doubt that Hola would last 2 seconds if it was doing, or provide a service that allowed those activities, as a commercial entity. This isn't TOR, so it's all back traceable through Holas servers. Now keeping your browser history or ad pushing... that's quite probable. |
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