Netflix? Pandora? You Can Have it All

In packing for my move to Qatar, I assembled everything necessary for living in another country for six to twelve months: nearly every article of clothing, a few books, a laptop, and a few other items. Additionally, I invested in an external hard drive, and on it was loaded every television episode and movie in my video library, from Gladiator to King of the Hill, to Secondhand Lions, to House.  In all, possibly five hundred hours of cinematic enjoyment went on that drive.  One of the major reasons I had done so was that I knew a lot of video sites in the United States wouldn’t work in Qatar, and I still didn’t know how censorship would work.But just before I left, a former student brought my attention to Virtual Private Networks.  Now don’t ask me how it all works – computers and phones are all still basically modern magic to me.  But when it registers your computer with an IP Address outside the country, one able to access all the sites enjoyed at home.

Based on my experience, I would recommend two possibilities.  The first, MediaHint, operates through your browser.  On FireFox, simply go to the MediaHint site and click “Start Using.”  That will add an extension to your browser which masks your location and identifies it as in the United States.  It works immediately, although over time I have noticed that the systems sometimes fails to re-register the IP, and so you might occasionally get a “Sorry, our services haven’t reached your part of the world yet” from Pandora or some other site.  Unfortunately, so far, I haven’t been able to get it to work on my Android phone or tablet.

I’ve also found that Hola Works pretty well.  It’s interface confuses me sometimes (especially when I tried it on my cell), but it seems to function more consistently than MediaHint.  In FireFox, it puts a little flame icon in the top right corner and lets you select which sites you need a foreign IP to use.  Further, if your home is somewhere else in the Western world, you can select a server in Britain, France, Japan, wherever.

As with many things, look these things up before leaving for Qatar to find which one works best in your circumstances.