A few months ago, the mighty goliath of movie streaming Netflix finally hit the shores of the UK after a painfully long wait, hoping to give LoveFlim a kick up the backside. For just £5.99 a month, we were excited at the opportunity to gain access to all the films and TV shows our US friends have access to.
Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the case as it appeared that browsing the selection available on UK Netflix is the same as browsing the DVD and even VHS sections at your local charity shops.
Fortunately, Netflix was designed to be used as you travelled; if logged into your UK Netflix account in the US you would gain access to its US content, which is significantly greater than what we are able to view. If only you could trick your device into thinking it was in the US...
This is where Unblock-us steps in. Unblock-us will basically allow you to fool Netflix into thinking you are accessing it from the US and give you US content.
Simply sign up for a trial account - this will last you a week (it’s $4.99/~£3.50 a month thereafter). You don’t have to give any payment details to get the trial, just your email address. This should give you enough time to decide if the service is for you... or perhaps you could just spend the week watching as much as possible to get the most of your freebie.
Once signed up, you’ll need to change some settings on your phone or tablet so you can watch The Walking Dead on the go. Unblock-Us has guides for iPhone/iPad users and a guide for Android users on Gingerbread and ICS. When next opened, the Netflix app will detect your ‘new’ location and give you the US content to browse.
The only other devices that Netflix works on are Windows Phone devices. Unfortunately as of yet there is no way to manually input DNS servers on Windows Phone devices. However, if your Internet is provided through a router it may be possible to change the DNS servers on the router itself so all devices connected get the same settings. Each router is different so it’s hard to give specific advice. But if you know what you are doing you simply need to change the DNS servers to the following:
- Primary DNS // 208.122.23.22
- Secondary DNS // 208.122.23.23
That should be it! If you ever want to go back to the original settings, simply put your DNS settings back to automatic.
OK, I’m off to watch the latest in film and TV as opposed to the charity shop offerings of Netflix UK!
