Unblock US Free Trial

A couple of years ago I was enjoying a fantastic holiday in Florida.  Everything was going fine, my children were loving it, my wife was happy and I’d even got over my perpetual fear of driving abroad.  Between the theme parks, fab restaurants, attractions and the wonderful Cape Canaveral we barely stopped for breath.  Then the heavens opened and we saw rain like I’ve never seen before in my life, it was incredible and virtually trapped us in our apartment.

Smart DNS Totally Free Trial

Fortunately I’d take a little media streamer device called the Roku, all set up with a few channels including my Netflix account.  I wasn’t entirely sure it would work with my UK account but it did and indeed much better than expected.  I was frankly amazed to discover that the Netflix I got in the USA was much, much better than the version I got in the UK – even though I was logged into the exact same account.  It was stuffed with the latest movies, extra series on my favorite box sets and it even had the complete series of Lost which had suddenly disappeared from UK Netflix while I was half way through it.

I’m trying to not exaggerate but it really was much better and it kept us all happy until those incredible Florida rainstorms disappeared.   On returning home I did some checking and it was true, every single version of Netflix is different.  What’s more although the price is pretty much standard, the amount of content in each version is completely different.  Last time I checked the US version had something like 5600 movies and shows, whilst the European locales had around 3000 or so.

Now I’m sure this all fluctuates but that’s a huge difference for subscribers just based on where they happen to login in from.  So naturally I started to feel a little annoyed when I returned home and all those amazing movies disappeared completely.   So I did some research to see if the normal geo-blocking circumvention tactics worked with Netflix.   Unfortunately they didn’t, well not completely, as Netflix is one of the most aggressive companies in blocking the use of proxies and VPNs.

It is still possible though and you can actually enjoy US Netflix from anywhere in the world.

How to Unblock US Netflix

Getting around the geo-restrictions is normally pretty easy if you do some research. However things are a little different with Netflix, they are very keen to keep us all restricted to our local versions. Their main defence is that they actually block all inbound connections made from commercial IP addresses. This was instigated a couple of years ago and effectively blocked 95% of all proxies and VPNs which are almost all built in commercial data centers (with commercial IP addresses).

This is actually an incredibly effective tactic as it’s much more difficult to obtain residential addresses. In fact they are very difficult to obtain and the vast majority of VPN service providers stopped supporting Netflix fairly quickly. All the ones that didn’t have residential addresses suffered the infamous unblock US Netflix proxy error! A couple of VPN providers invested in some residential servers although they didn’t advertise the fact. Indeed the VPN we recommend in these pages Identity Cloaker, is one of those and does indeed support access – although only to the US site.

There is a better option though if you don’t need the security of a VPN connection. So how to unblock Netflix without VPN well it’s called Smart DNS and it’s very simple to use.  This works in a similar way to a VPN connection but it only routes a small part of your connection through a US based server, just enough to hide your location.  Once established the content will stream directly from the Netflix server to your device making it much quicker than a VPN under normal circumstance. The following video will demonstrate hot to get Netflix america in the UK.

As you can see it’s extremely easy to use, in fact all you need to do in most circumstances is change your DNS server settings once and everything will be unlocked automatically.   It doesn’t supply any security or encryption but it is the simplest way to unblock websites.   Indeed it’s so simple it will work on virtually any streaming device where you can get access to the network connections setting to change the DNS servers.

Again as mentioned the majority of these solutions don’t work with Netflix because of the IP address classification problem, however there is one that now works perfectly to unblock Netflix.   Forget about the more expensive options to unblock US DNS  this is a much more reliable solution.  It’s a product I used several years ago and it has always worked well, however it now included US Netflix and I’ve been testing it for the last couple of weeks.

Please remember that using just Smart DNS provides no additional security at all, but the advantage is that it doesn’t slow down your connection either. Our recommendation has both, so use the VPN client when you need security and leave Smart DNS to unblock US Netflix.

You can try it out for 14 days entirely free of charge here –

Smart DNS Totally Free Trial