up until around 2014 the cheap and easy way to get around region-locked online
content was to fire up a trusty vpn like private internet access but then netflix
pushed an update to detect and stop its users from doing so and the rest of the
industry followed suit it was a dark time and many people simply accepted
that the golden age of watching anything you wanted was over
but what if i told you that there's another way to mask your address one
that could not only unblock geo-restricted content but even save you
a substantial amount of money on your subscriptions what if i told you you can
use it on your smart tv home console or any other device
and what if i told you about it after this message from today's sponsor
jackery thanks jackery for sponsoring this video from september 20th to
october 18th jackery is celebrating their 9th anniversary with a photo
contest watch till the end to learn more
whether it's an out-of-market sports ball game your favorite show that just got taken off netflix but only in your
region or just any other random footage that's
exclusively available in some other country losing access to content sucks i
mean as a user you don't care which cable network or syndication has the
rights you just want to kick back relax and put whatever you want on the big
screen now even when they worked there were drawbacks to using a vpn to get
around these problems i mean it wasn't convenient exactly to configure it on
devices like smart tvs and rokus and
especially if you were proxying to a distant location your network
performance for everything other than your stream could slow down
substantially thankfully a canadian company got fed up
and went to work developing something similar to a vpn but
kind of better actually at least when it comes to watching sports and streaming
services and i'll tell you more about why it's not a replacement for a vpn
later meet the stream locator the hardware is
frankly speaking nothing special it's a gigabit capable ac 1200 dual band router
the real magic is in their customized open wrt based firmware that uses a
combination of smart dns transparent dns proxy and domain ip-based smart routing
to circumvent regional blocks and it does all of this while not slowing down
or compromising the security of your regular browsing now of course our
viewers are not going to accept magic
as an explanation for how a device on their network functions and they
shouldn't so let's talk about how exactly it works
now normally you type netflix.com into
your browser which sends a request to a dns server which converts that
netflix.com url to an ip address that
your browser can actually connect to then traffic starts to flow
the stream locator deviates from this normal manner of operation by checking
your dns requests against a bank of urls
that it has stored if it sees you're searching for a video streaming site it
takes the ip address that your dns server says corresponds to that url and
throws it in the garbage instead it responds with the ip of a proxy server
that is in the region you're trying to access it from and all of your traffic
reroutes through that just like how a vpn works it's a pretty
elegant solution to this problem and we actually wanted to shoot our review of
this thing over a month ago but then netflix managed to block stream locator
system just two days after we had tested the device
and confirmed that it worked talk about timing now streamlocator has recently
gotten things back up and running again using basically the same system we just
explained but with an added layer of ipv6 hackery and at the time of writing
american netflix is back online with the promise of more countries in the near to
mid future i said a moment ago that it works just like a vpn but i also said
before that that it's not a replacement for a vpn
what gives okay the difference is that a vpn routes
all of your traffic through the selected proxy server and all of the good ones
encrypt your data to make it more difficult for your internet service
provider to track what you're doing both of those factors contribute to crap
your performance stream locator by contrast doesn't
advertise any kind of privacy enhancement whatsoever but the benefit
of their approach is that by cherry picking the traffic that gets rerouted
they can achieve performance in other applications like web browsing and
gaming that is on par with your raw connection
here's a quick demo let's say we like ufc but we don't like paying jacked up
american pay-per-view prices for it let's subscribe for 12.50 a month in
germany where if they're obviously struggling to find an audience for the
sport and look at that
same sweaty dudes and gals beating each other up much lower price
now we jump into a game while our stream is running on a second monitor and look
at these ping times just about identical to our regular
connection now you might look at this and think gee
that could really be a software product and honestly that was my first response it
seems reasonable on the surface but
only if you want to use it on a computer
consider this certain devices and services don't use
dns for example the netflix smart tv app
is developed by netflix it doesn't have to check netflix's own address with a
dns server and instead it just connects directly to the ip
to adapt to this stream locator uses ipforwarding instead of smart dns in
those situations now they could build apps for every device under the sun that
each contain all of the necessary workarounds but that would introduce a
ton of development overhead and i actually agree with them that from a
user perspective this is way simpler to use
instead of downloading and logging into and configuring an app i just plug this
unit into my existing modem router combo that my isp sent me it detects my
existing subnet and creates a non-conflicting one for all the devices
that connect to it and then i never think about it again
you even have the choice between using the wi-fi access point that's built into
your stream locator or connecting to a higher performance one if it's a
dedicated ap like once we've shown in the past from ubiquity or ruckus then no
special configuration is required other than disabling the wi-fi in the stream
locator but if you want to use an all-in-one like wi-fi router connected
to it you'll probably need to put it in bridge mode now the most pain-free
install would be to put your isp combo unit in bridge mode so it's acting only
as a modem and have the stream locator act as your router and wireless access
point for your whole system connecting to it is as simple as connecting to your
existing network unfortunately in our experience that comes with some
limitations the stripped-down version of open wrt that they're running has some
of the advanced features removed and i
really do mean advanced features and finger quotes because i don't personally
consider port forwarding to be that advanced also the hardware inside is
fine at best it uses a mediatek
mt7621a chipset which is enough to speed
test our gigabit connection at around 850 megabits so
more than enough for most residential connections but is not exactly state of
the art back to the good stuff though it has this really cool function where you can
run supported streaming services from different locations concurrently
so back to vpns for a second remember the way they work is you choose one
location and all of your network traffic routes through it so if you wanted to
say for example watch a ufc fight with that cheap german subscription while
also streaming something from bbc you're fresh out of luck with the stream
locator though you could have netflix from the uk and american amazon prime at
the same time hooked up to your home theater screen just check out the services list toggle
the options you want and you're all set speaking of home theaters by the way
we've got a doozy of a video coming up where we're going to be testing HDMI 2.1
cables from a ton of manufacturers to see who's lying and who's not make sure
you're subscribed so you don't miss it if you're trying to maintain privacy for
whatever reason a vpn is still an important piece of your toolkit and it
should be noted that any device whose purpose is to sort through your internet
traffic has inherent privacy risk associated with it you've got to kind of
trust streamlocator because we don't have any way of guaranteeing that
they're not benefiting from any kind of data collection i'd love to hear your
guys's discussion about that in the comments below what we do know for sure is that for the
price it's a really compelling package that does exactly what it says on the
tin for 85 bucks which includes the first year of service after which it's
seven dollars a month it really does unlock region locked content
which is all fine and good but my lord
is this legal
well yes and maybe no their own website
states the following the short answer yes of course stream locator is
completely legal in 99 of the world
which of course leaves out that one percent which could be a lot more than
one percent because if you're living somewhere like china or iran which last
time i checked is a lot more than one percent of the world you could very well
be breaking laws by using this thing
the good news for everyone else is that the worst case scenario is that right
holders might get mad at streaming platforms for not geo-blocking their
content effectively enough but that doesn't really sound like your problem
does it what it does sound like is a segway to our sponsor zachary jackry
wants to inspire an outdoors lifestyle so they're advertising online as tech
tips because apparently they think we need to be reached they want people to
be closer to nature and to live with a positive and energetic attitude and from
september 20th to october 18th they are celebrating their ninth anniversary with
a photo contest for a chance to win big prizes to enter all you have to do is
take a picture of you exploring the outdoors and upload it to their campaign
site all winners will be notified by email by october 29th and we're gonna
have all the links down below seriously though guys if you're using a vpn and it
works for you keep using it and if you like this video make sure you check out
our video on how to browse the internet anonymously