For years the region locking efforts of the large media sites have been thwarted by the existence of various ip address changing systems. These have been largely focused on two specific systems – proxies and VPNs. Both of these have been used by hundreds of thousands of people all across the world to bypass region locks, country and ISP filtering. Basically these systems work by hiding your real ip address and instead showing the address of the intermediate server.

So for example Australian users would use a US proxy server to sign up for Netflix and stream media directly to their pc even though Netflix was previously not available in Australia. In fact over a quarter of a million Australians were using Netflix before it was officially available there simply by using proxies and VPNS. The media companies would look up the location of the IP address and only see the one assigned to the proxy server.

Netflix-Proxy-Error

However things have now changed and now there’s a very extensive Netflix VPN block in place. This works in a very specific way, which has actually wiped out 99% of the VPN services with regards to accessing Netflix from a location which is not accessible to Netflix. What the media giant does is look at the origin of the IP address of the connection type. Although Netflix can’t determine whether a VPN is being used what it can do is look at the IP address and determine is it’s either a residential or commercial address.

All the VPN services use IP addresses allocated from data centers and therefore are commercial addresses. Netflix blocks all connections from these addresses, allowing only residential addresses access to the media. This has basically meant that most of the VPN services are now useless for accessing Netflix, however there are a few services like these which are the best VPN services for Netflix.