Using a VPN to Watch Hotstar in the UK
A few years ago if you wanted to access foreign TV stations in the United Kingdom then your options where somewhat limited. During the last century I for one could remember a spate of enormous satellite dishes outside various houses and pubs as people tried to get access to alternative channels. You still see smaller dishes to access things like Polish TV and channels broadcast across Europe although there much less common nowadays.
The reason is that virtually every media company of any note broadcasts the majority of their programmes online. This means that you don’t need to mess around with expensive dishes, you can potentially just watch them from your PC or connect up to your TV. In reality though it isn’t quite that straight forward, as we’ll demonstrate with a fantastic broadcaster from India called Hotstar.
This is probably the best place to find Indian programmes online. It’s probably best understood as the Asian of being able to watch the BBC iPlayer. There are literally thousands of hours of movies, TV shows, documentaries and sports programmes in up to eight different languages. You don’t even need to be Indian to enjoy Hotstar as there’s lots in English and they even cover things like Premiership football.
It’s well worth watching and especially interesting are some of the documentaries and news broadcasts which give a different perspective to the world. Also, if you’re a cricket lover, then it’s definitely the channel to get. Unfortunately, there is a slight problem for anyone who wants to watch Hotstar in the UK – it’s blocked by default to all non-Indian connections. The channel is slowly expanding and now there are a few more Hotstar available countries but it’s still inaccessible from most of Europe and the US.
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More specifically whenever anyone tries to connect to Hotstar their IP address is checked, if it’s not registered to an Indian ISP then you’ll get a polite message and redirected. You won’t be able to stream any of the video content apart from a few advertisements. It’s the standard practice of large media companies who restrict content to their domestic market because of licensing restrictions.
How to Watch Hotstar in the UK
Yes, there is a solution, and you can see a quick demonstration in the following video which is hosted on YouTube.
As you can see it’s actually quite simple to learn how to watch Hotstar outside India on PC or any other media device. Although when you visit the site, your IP is checked the trick is to hide your location from this detection phase. Now there are two main alternatives – a VPN or as demonstrated in the video to use Smart DNS. Both work in similar ways by hiding your true location by using an intermediate server to unblock Hotstar.
The reason that Smart DNS is arguably a better choice is because it doesn’t route your entire connection through an intermediate server. In fact, it’s only the initial detection phase that is routed through the third-party Indian server, then the connection is direct to your computer. The VPN does provide a layer of security in the form of encryption, so if this is important to you then you should look to this solution instead.
The other advantage to using Smart DNS is that it’s much easier to configure and only has to be done once (as long as your IP address doesn’t change). This makes it much easier to enable on devices other than computers, as all you need to do is access the network settings for it to work.
So, it works equally well on any network enabled device, from Smart TVs to Games consoles. Whereas obviously you can’t get a VPN connection to work on most devices in the same way. Also, many people have complained that Hotstar detects VPN connections although this is more an issue with the company providing the service rather than the technology I suspect.
So, if you’re keen to unlock the wonderful content on Hotstar, then take a look at using Smart DNS. The company demonstrated in the video has a cracking product that works really well. It literally takes a couple of minutes to set up and you’ll learn how to access the channels very easily. It’s a great alternative to using a Hotstar UK VPN program that’s for sure. What’s more you’ll automatically unlock hundred of other channels from across the world too.