Using an Australian Proxy Site to Bypass Geo-blocking

If you’ve ever had a need to find an Australian proxy to watch videos, then you’ve probably discovered that it’s not easy. Actually, finding a decent free one is pretty much impossible – believe me I’ve tried. The reason I’ve tried is that I have a few friends from Sydney who are working in the UK for a little while and they really miss their TV shows and news from ABC (the Australian one) and lots of other streaming services. Now normally I wouldn’t be arsed about this – from what I’ve heard Aussie TV is pretty awful. However, this bunch are great, wanted to watch their favorite shows and I guess we all get homesick, so I wanted to try and help them out.

To access the shows and stuff on ABC they have a system a bit like BBC iPlayer but their version is called ABC iView. It only allows you to stream shows not download them and unfortunately like the majority of these sites – most of the content is Geo-Blocked. Basically, it means that if you connect from outside Australia then you’ll get blocked from viewing.

Here’s a typical geo error message – Blocked to copyright reasons, digital rights – blah, blah, blah, which is what you’ll get for any non-Australian IP address. So, you need to view using an Australian VPN server or proxy to watch most of the content on the ABC site. If you want to try and find a free proxy to use, then this site is probably the best chance – Proxies filtered by country. I looked for a few days and never found one fast enough to stream video unfortunately, but you might be luckier.

Free Proxies – Slow and Normally Blacklisted/Blocked

The other free option I looked at was to use TOR and Foxy Proxy. Basically, this has the same problem with finding an Australian exit node which works well _ I’d give this a miss unless you have about 10 hours a day spare (every day!).  Also, they’re all too slow for any of the streaming platforms I tried.  The speed issue is down to simple overloading however this also causes most of the server addresses to get banned to.  A case in point is Hotspot Shield which stopped working with almost every streaming service I’ve tried it with.

After making some calls I discovered that one of the main reasons that Australian proxies are so hard to find is that bandwidth costs are extremely expensive in Australia.  No one is going to provide their internet connection for free as running an open proxy will get extremely expensive very quickly. These costs unfortunately are reflected in the private companies who offer these services as well – they’re either very expensive or completely overloaded. The vast majority don’t even bother with Australian servers due to the high cost.   In fact, they’re nearly as expensive as some of the residential Ip providers which you only currently need for Netflix.

So, I’ve highlighted two companies which offer the best deals and a decent VPN service you can trust. They both offer very reasonable subscriptions and short term/trial options which don’t lock you into automatic subscriptions (which many do!). They both also include Australian servers as well as servers in loads of other countries – e.g., US for American sites like Hulu, NBC and Pandora and UK for the BBC iPlayer. Lots of other countries included for free as well.

Here’s one in action from YouTube…..

It’s entitled Using an Australian Proxy if you want to watch it here on YouTube site.

Don’t sign up for a long subscription with anyone initially. There can be routing and speed problems to Australian proxies from some ISPs – you should check with a trial or short account first. You can watch  ABC iView in the UK or USA using most decent proxies. Although check out the Aussie sites you need first, ABC for instance seems to change – some of the content is accessible to anyone a lot of the time. You might not even need to change VPN to Australia, check first that you are actually being blocked – you might save yourself some cash 🙂

Aussie Proxy/VPN Recommendations.

Anyway I checked a load of these services and here’s my favourites, better than everything else I looked at, both had great customer support.

Identity Cloaker – Have now added some Australian proxies to their subscription, they have more servers but perhaps less countries (focus on UK and USA servers) than the other top services.  However personally I prefer fast servers in specific countries rather than servers all over the place. You can get their 10 day trial here – 10 day trial Identity Cloaker.

The Australian proxy servers were very quick with the latest version of Identity Cloaker software which uses a compression algorithm to speed it up.  The encryption level can be modified to suit your internet usage.  I generally leave the AES level on full, but you could technically disable it completely when streaming video.

Update – found another one and it’s fantastic for Australian channels (and lots of other stuff) and it’s cheap!!  It’s called NordVPN and is one the biggest VPN providers in the world check out their special offer deals – you can see their discount pages here.

Any Free Australian Proxies?

There are a few if you search around the proxy aggregate sites.  It’s difficult to list a single resource as the availability changes all the time you can try places like proxy.org though.  The main problem with free proxies is that they quickly get overloaded and either become unusable or just fall over!  It’s even harder to find Australian proxies because of the high cost of bandwidth – people are unlikely to want to subsidize a free proxy server for strangers to use.

The free Australian proxies are actually ok to use for small tasks – e.g registering for an Australian geo-restricted site or similar.   However, you won’t be able to use them to access media sites or to stream geo-blocked sites as they’re normally either blocked or just too slow.