How To Watch Geo-Blocked Movies


Horror movie buffs have a remarkable appetite for movies – no matter how obscure they might be. For real horror heads, foreign productions often offer the most enchanting thrills. Popular movie streaming services like Netflix and Mubi host a great many excellent foreign horror flicks. There is, however, a catch. Movie streaming companies routinely geo-block regional content. Geo-blocking is when a company prevents people browsing from some regions from accessing content – even if that content is hosted by the service and available to other users.

Luckily, there is a way around such restrictions. All it takes is a few steps. Here is a quick guide to watching content that has been regionally blocked.

How Do Companies Geo-Block?

Companies like Netflix block content on a regional basis by identifying a user’s IP address. An IP address is essentially a network address: it allows your computer to be identified by software and to communicate effectively over the internet. Every internet-connected device and website has a unique IP address made up of a string of numbers. A great deal of information can be decoded from this string of numbers, including the approximate location of a device or web server.

Companies offering media hosting and streaming use information from a user’s IP address to approximate their location. Certain locations will have certain content blocked. This is all completely automated: algorithms instantly make decisions regarding the location of a service user.

Why Do Companies Geo-Block?

Media streaming companies like Netflix actually geo-block content for a good reason. In order to host movies and television shows, a hosting company has to sign a licensing agreement with the distributors of the media in question. Licenses are usually bought individually for each country in which the media is intended to be streamed.

The media streaming and hosting company needs to make decisions about which licenses it purchases so that it can continue to make a profit. If a film is not likely to bring users in a certain region to the streaming service, then it will not be worth the financial cost of the license in the eyes of the streaming platform. This explains why it can be so freaking hard to find the latest foreign horror movies on major platforms in the UK and USA.

Downloading A VPN

The easiest way to bypass the geo-blocking efforts of major streaming services is to get Surfshark or another well-established VPN. VPN – standing for Virtual Private Network – is a technology solution to IP vulnerability and data privacy issues. VPNs reroute internet traffic through an encrypted connection and pass it through a remote server. This allows a user to

appear as if they are surfing from a remote server as opposed to their own device. The best VPNs allow users to pick from a large selection of remote servers all over the world.

Setting Up Your VPN

The best VPNs are easy to set-up for streaming geo-blocked content. Once installed, they offer a drop-down menu that enables you to pick the region you wish to ‘browse’ from.