Scorchio75 sez, "Having just moved to NZ from the UK, I'd love to be able to access BBC iPlayer, 4 on Demand, etc., but unless I cough-up for a VPN I'm out of luck. 'Fyx' have just launched in NZ and offer a 'Global Mode' that will allegedly allow their customers to access region-locked services such as iPlayer, 4oD, Hulu, etc. They don't guarantee that you'll be able to access these services (and couldn't the content providers block this?), but if it works..."

  • mrpostal

    Interesting. I wonder if they’re doing anything like unblock-us.

    Disclosure: I’m a customer of theirs, so I can get netflix in Australia because I think the whole geolocked content stuff is complete bullshit. Why should Americans be the only ones who can pay for streaming loads of content?

    I like unblock-us because it’s NOT a vpn service and they do some type of DNS magic so that it appears I’m from the US.

    I’d bet that this Kiwi ISP is probably doing a similar thing and I hope the practice spreads here to the ‘mainland’ :).

    • http://twitter.com/adiwick Adi W

      Thanks for the tip re: Unblock-Us – I’ll check them out!

  • h4x0r

    interesting

  • Datavist

    I’m a Kiwi and I’m freakin excited about this, you’ve gotta love their spiel too:  ”No longer be second-grade-third-world-digital-boat-people people with FYX – your new ISP. Use the internet the way nature intended … with freedom and grace.”

    Not to sound moany, cause their’s plenty worse things in the world than not being able to stream video, but that’s totally how you feel, like a digital dalit, untouchable and undesirable. 

    I’ve circumvented this by being a terrible pirate using XBMC on an ATV2, but I’ll sign up to this brave new world of legit content in a flash. 

    Though I have a shitty feeling that the moment I do, the uber scrotwad copywrong douches will jingle my jangle and close the loop. Then I’ll have to return to the life of a pirate. 

    • http://twitter.com/JayStephens Jay Stephens

       Dude, we ARE digital dalits. Why? Because most of the adspend on those sites targets US consumers. Ergo, they get bugger all for hits from places where advertisers are not forking over the dough for page impressions. It’s the adspend that keeps the companies in business, so who can blame them for trying to keep us away from their CPU cycles. Other times (like with Pandora etc) it’s upstream copyright issues, in the sense that content is licensed by region…. but that will likely fade away over time as licensing and cross-regional agreements become ubiquitous….. the ringfenced content/resources issue, tho, is not gonna go away :(

      • petz79

         So, why don’t they target their ads? Show people from the US american ads, people from Europe european ads and so on. They could open their ad program and get money from all over the world.

        • beemoh

          Generally, two reasons- either:

          a/ They don’t have a local office to sell local advertising through- not every major national media company is Fox or Disney- meaning adverts will have to be for major international brands and be too generic (“Buy Coca-Cola”, not “Buy Coca-Cola because we have this special promotion on in this country”, or “Buy Britain Cola”) or for stuff simply not available in a given territory.

          or b/ They *do* have a local office to sell local advertising through, but they are either unable to sell the advertising for a given show, (eg a UK channel passed on or was outbid for a show made by their US counterpart), don’t have the resources to sell the advertising effectively, or have their own on-demand platform and both parties would rather you used that instead.

          Some of those make sense, some less so, but they’re still the world we live in right now. A lot of those issues are progressively deteriorating, though.

  • http://twitter.com/gatekepa Kepa

    Interesting. My wife is from Tennessee and has a Hulu Plus account, so when she moved here (to NZ) she was undoubtedly a little pissed. We found Hotspot shield. Not exactly sure if it’s a VPN thing or what, but it lets us use Hulu Plus. It won’t, however, work with actual US TV Networks’ websites. And if you use it in conjunction with Adblock Plus the annoying ads don’t annoy you.

    I wonder if this “global mode” would slow down already less-than-ideal transfer speeds.

  • TheBehinder

    *If* it works, you will quickly be scuppered by the unreliable connection speeds and bandwidth limitations inherent in the country.

    Brave move for them to try, but it’ll be a while before the country’s infrastructure is ready for high bandwidth streaming services.

  • empollado