Watching American and British videos in Germany

[This post gets a little long and technical. To sum up the juicy middle: we’ve recently come across some good solutions for watching blocked internet videos. If you’re also an expat interested in watching British and American television online from other countries, read on. Otherwise, skip this post and go work on your Oktoberfest dance moves or something.]

As native English speakers who spend most of our time outside of the US and the UK, we are often looking for ways to watch American and British TV shows and movies on the internet. Unfortunately, most of the websites that work well in their home countries block visitors from abroad.

We have a VPN account that we can use to access these websites, but it isn’t always the best experience. Using a VPN will slow down all of your internet traffic, sometimes so much so that you can’t stream the video you were trying to watch.

Using Alternative DNS

Recently there are a couple of companies that have started offering alterative DNS services that allow you to access regionally blocked internet content without using a VPN. We hadn’t heard of the services until we were contact by UnoTelly/UnoDNS and offered a free subscription in exchange for an independent review. At first we were skeptical, but we were happy to discover that it is a legitimate company offering a useful service.

We’ve been using UnoTelly for about a month now and have been generally happy with the service. Once we had configured it on our home router, all of our computers and portable devices were able to access previously blocked content on Hulu and BBC without problem. (There are a few sites that haven’t worked, but we usually move on and forget about it.)

Unblocking YouTube

Visitors to YouTube from Germany are probably familiar with the GEMA blocked messages. UnoTelly doesn’t address that problem, but there is a free browser plug-in that does.

When you try to access a YouTube video that is blocked, you will see a short notification while the plugin works its magic. A few seconds later the video will start playing automatically.

Technical Thoughts

I’ll try to offer a non-geeky explanation of how VPNs and and alternative DNS servers work. A VPN routes your internet traffic through a third party. Many VPNs offer encryption and can be used to hide your internet traffic from outsiders trying to spy on it. Most companies don’t allow employees to access their internal network remotely without using a VPN. It is also a good idea to use a VPN if you are connecting to the internet via public WiFi at someplace like a coffee shop or a hotel.

If you are in Germany but use a VPN that is in New York, then your network communication with other computers on the internet has to get routed through New York. This makes it look to the rest of the internet like your computer is in New York, which is why you can access regionally restricted content using a VPN. The downside is that your internet traffic has to take a longer route to get to you. That means that your connection will be slower, particularly if the VPN route is congested with a lot of other users.

DNS acts like a phonebook for the internet. When you tell your computer that you want to go to https://www.zurika.com, your computer consults the DNS to find out the number (IP address) of the website. Internet traffic is routed via IP address, just like phone calls are routed by phone number. Alternative DNS services like UnoTelly change a few of the IP addresses in their “internet phonebook”, but leave most of the numbers unchanged.

Google runs its own, not to modify any of the entries, but to provide a faster an more secure internet experience. Using an alternative DNS service like UnoTelly might slow your browsing experience. When I ran tests with it, UnoTelly was ~30% slower than the DNS service provided by our ISP. I can’t claim that I noticed a difference in my normal internet usage though.

What are the security risks of using an alternative DNS service? First, just by the nature of how DNS works they will certainly know what internet sites you visit. I don’t see much risk there unless you are paranoid. Further risks come down to how much you trust them and their own level of security. Some hackers attack DNS servers as a way of snooping on users internet traffic or worse. When you pick your DNS provider, you have to decide what your priorities are and who you trust. For me, UnoTelly appears to be low risk and the upside of accessing the internet content I want to see is more than worth it.

21 thoughts on “Watching American and British videos in Germany”

  1. Almost forgot to mention – UnoTelly offered some 25% off coupons for their gold products. Let us know (comment or email) if you’re interested and I’ll send you the coupon code.

    UPDATE: Here are the details of the coupon code. It’s only good for the first 5 people to use it, so it might not be valid anymore, but feel free to give it a try.

    25% off Gold coupon code:

    [ zurika ]

    The expiry date is Dec 31 2012
    The coupon can be applied to any UnoDNS Gold products
    The coupon can be redeemed during checkout to get 25% off

  2. I am using Hotspot Shield Free VPN. However free version is ad supported, but its good from all other available free vpn’s. You can surf anonymously and access all blocked websites using HSS.

  5. Would love to have one of those coupon codes. have used similar service before but like the fact Unotelly offers you a discount if you subscribe the year in advance..AND offer paypal payment.

    Thanks
    Mark

  7. can i have the code as well. i would like to sign up for the gold products. thank you very much!

  11. DNS has long confused me, so maybe I’m missing something obvious in the metaphor here. What I still don’t get: why does UnoTelly’s changing of a few of the addresses in their phonebook result in you appearing to be somewhere you’re not physically located (which results in the viewable content)? I mean, let’s say they alter the results of a lookup for hulu.com such that your computer opens a connection to 1.2.3.4 instead of 6.7.8.9 — how does that allow you to sneak by hulu.com’s mechanisms for detecting foreigners? Doesn’t hulu.com still see your own IP address (let’s say it#s 33.44.55.66) when you make your request and resolve that to dsl-33-44-55-66.munich.isp.de and decide to block it based on that?

    Or is the service that UnoTelly is offering an altered resolution of 33.44.55.66 such that it points to CustomerID-5678abc.unotelly.co.uk when hulu.com’s servers try to see if you’re coming from a country they block or not? In which case, how can you make sure that the site trying to block you doesn’t use their own DNS to decide whether to let 33.44.55.66 in or not? I guess you can’t, and that’s why it still fails for some sites, right?

    DNS makes my head hurt.

    • Cliff, I was surprised that UnoDNS actually worked the first time I tried. I don’t understand how it actually works, but I can speculate…

      What if the DNS entry for verify.hulu.com (hypothetical address) gets mapped to a server in Germany that has a constant VPN to the US and just forwards all traffic through the VPN? To Hulu my IP address would be in the US, as if I were running my own VPN; but for me I don’t have to worry about making sure my VPN is running. The other advantage for me in this case is that Hulu doesn’t serve the media content from the same machines that check my IP, probably for performance/architectural reasons. So I get as fast a connection to media.hulu.com as possible, without incurring the performance penalty of a VPN in that case. (All speculation.)

      To stretch the phone book analogy: When I call verify.hulu.com I dial a number that forwards my call to the real verify.hulu.com, but spoofs my CallerID to show a US number rather than my own.

  12. Leanne and Raj, the coupon code has been sent to you.

    The coupon code is only valid for the first 5 people to use it, and at this point we’ve had more requests than that. I’ll continue to give it out if a couple more people want it, because I suspect not every single requester will end up using it.

    Cliff, I’m going to have to let Scott field that one.

  13. Thank you for the Unotelly discount codes.

    Could I have one as well? I am planning to sign up for 1 year and this would come really handy.

  19. The code is now in the first comment on this post. Not sure if it still works, but you’re all welcome to give it a try.

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