About 20 years ago the Internet began a slow increase that hit its main stride as far as giving information to a more mainstream audience. Although it’s funny to think about at times, the ‘Net used to astonish folks for the raw ability to be able to connect to a website anywhere in the world – all from the comfort of your home or office.

Now, mobile markets have provided a way to expand that even further and at least one-third of humanity has reached the web. But then someone had to go and ruin it, and in came “Geo Restrictions.”

Geographic restrictions are limits that are put in place that prevent a user from accessing a website or web-based service simply because of where they live. Sometimes it’s countries that put these restrictions in place, sometimes it’s the policy of a company. You’ve seen it if the message “We’re sorry but this content cannot be viewed in your country” has irritatingly popped up on your screen.And it’s all tied to one little number on your computer: your IP address.

For instance, copyright and rebroadcast rights prevent an organization like Hulu from providing their services in countries outside the U.S. and Japan. But that doesn’t mean that the service can’t be accessed to watch anything from Afro Samurai to Zombie Roadkill, all thanks to virtual private networks.

So, if you live outside of the U.S. but want to access some services that require a U.S.-based IP address, all you have to do is log in through a service like VPN Zoom. This would allow a user to connect from, say, Spain or Germany to connect through a VPN server in the states, which would then give them the local “authentication” necessary for viewing premium services like Hulu, or Netflix, Spotify or other web-based services.

While Hulu did step up efforts earlier this year to try and outright ban some IP addresses associated with VPNs, the practice is still surefire. So, whether someone was traveling outside the U.S. and wanted to watch their favorite TV show through Hulu, or just happened to be browsing to Hulu while using VPN to protect themselves over a coffee shop’s WiFi, the following message could come up: “Based on your IP-address, we noticed you are trying to access Hulu through an anonymous proxy tool.  Hulu is not currently available outside the U.S  If you’re in the U.S you’ll need to disable your anonymizer to access videos on Hulu.”

For a couple months earlier this year this affected about 15 percent of VPN users who were trying to access Hulu for a little while. Fortunately, most VPN services put measures in place such as rolling IP addresses that help solve this problem, meaning you and I can go back to watching our favorite TV programs – whether we’re hanging out at our favorite WiFi location in the U.S. or are trying to access the services from outside of it. VPN Zoom is here to help you access your content needs.