When you think about VPN, you are probably thinking about hiding your identity to download a torrent and stopping your school or employer from seeing your web searches, personal emails and text messages. But there is something else you can do with a VPN, something many people are already taking advantage of, and that is virtually residing in another country.
Why would you possibly want to do that? That has to do with the convoluted and overly complicated licensing of entertainment content, you know the stuff the RIAA and MPAA want you to pay a lot of money for, music and movies. Why sell something once when you can make money with it over and over again? Welcome to the world of entertainment and copyright.
Unless you have been living under a rock, you have probably heard of Netflix and their TV and movie streaming service. For Netflix to stream content they have to license it, and because you can stream Netflix anywhere where you have an Internet connection, licensing has become really complicated. This culminated in Netflix being forced to enforce region restrictions, basically showing you only what is licensed for a specific country or region.
Therein lies the problem…
It is well known that as a US based company Netflix offers the largest selection of movies and TV shows to its US based customers, while doing what it can to offer as much content to customers around the globe as possible. Very often the differences are striking…
And that is where a VPN comes in…
Customers picked up on this really quickly and started to use VPNs to circumvent region restrictions by virtually residing in whatever country the content they wanted to watch was available, mostly the US.
In an effort to enforce those previously mentioned legal obligations, Netflix was forced to stop subscribers who had been using a VPN to hide their real location from accessing the service. Netflix accomplished this by blocking IP addresses from known VPN servers, leaving everyone connection through those servers in the dust, a game of cat and mouse if you wish.
Finally there is a solution…
HideMyAss (aka HMA), one of the world’s largest VPN providers, has finally come up with a solution to allow you to access Netflix from outside the US once again. If you live outside the US simply connect to their Liberty Island server, which you can find under cities in their app, and voila, problem solved!
Sounds too good to be true?
Movie buffs rejoice! We tested it and it works like a charm. The obvious concern, of course, is that Netflix will block the server’s IP like it has done many times in the past. We reached out to HMA to confirm that this isn’t just a short-term fix. HMA confirmed that they have found a workaround. For obvious reasons HMA didn’t elaborate how exactly they are doing that. But don’t take my word for it…
It gets even better…
During the month of May HMA is offering their service at an reduced price for you to test out their service and start streaming, giving you an opportunity to test it out yourself. Starting from May 3rd until May 31st they will be offering HMA! Pro VPN at these discounted prices:
1 month $9.99 (13% off)
6 month $39.96 (42% off)
12 month $59.88 (57% off)
So go ahead and give them a try. If you factor in the cost of renting a movie vs. being able to just stream one with your Netflix subscription, you’ll recoup the cost of the HMA in no time.
Let us know how it works for you in the comments!