Geo-blocks are never fun, whether you want to follow your favorite drag queens on their road to stardom, or just want to binge The Office for the fifth time. Luckily, there’s an easy solution to bypass geo-restrictions and have a fabulous time. To unblock RuPaul’s Drag Race on Netflix, you just need to change your online-facing location to a region where RuPaul’s Drag Race is available for streaming. Pretty easy, right? In practice, yes – but there are a few things you should know about. Read on for the details.
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How to Change Your Online Location to unblock RuPaul’s Drag Race on Netflix
Don’t pack your bags just yet. You don’t need to leave the comfort of your couch watch RuPaul’s Drag Race in your area. Instead, you’ll be using a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to trick the streaming giant into believing you’re in the “correct” region.
How does that work, you ask? Well, websites and online services can see your location through an identifier called the IP address. Your IP broadcasts your country, city, and sometimes ZIP code, so streaming services like Netflix know which library you should be able to access. Banning IP ranges is also how websites in the U.S. blocked European users when GDPR regulations were first implemented.
Anyway, using a VPN lets you connect to a server in a different country, thus changing your IP in the process. That allows you to get around pesky geo-blocks and watch RuPaul’s Drag Race no matter where you are in the world.
Naturally, you can also catch any of your other favorites that aren’t available locally, or watch shows from back home when you’re travelling abroad. As a bonus, you can access region-exclusive streaming sites, like BBC iPlayer in the UK or Hulu in the US. You pretty much have a whole new world of content waiting for you.
What Else Can You Do with a VPN?
The primary focus of a VPN is actually to encrypt (or garble) your network data so it can’t be read by outsiders. That includes government surveillance, hackers trying to harvest your sensitive info, or ISPs looking to sell your browsing history and location data. Pretty useful, considering hacking activity has only increased in recent years, especially around free Wi-Fi hotspots at hotels and similar locations.
Another neat thing about VPNs encrypting your data is that your ISP can’t throttle your bandwidth. After all, they can’t tell whether you’re watching Netflix, YouTube, or Amazon Prime Video. They can’t exactly slow down your streaming if they don’t know which service to target. This should make those weekend binges go much more smoothly.
Security and throttling aside, you can also use a VPN to get around firewalls at school or at work. If you’re not working from home, might as well sneak in an episode or two during downtime or a lunch break. Obviously, you should only do so on your personal devices. The contest may be exciting, but getting in trouble at work isn’t.
Can Any VPN Unblock RuPaul’s Drag Race?
We wish it were that easy. The sad reality is that Netflix heavily restricts VPN usage on their platform, to the point where they blocked residential IP addresses to filter out providers that started using them. Of course, all they’ve managed to accomplish was blocking out thousands of regular Netflix users, most of which never even used VPNs.
At least you don’t have to worry about getting your Netflix account banned for using a VPN. Sure, it’s technically against their terms of service to bypass geo-blocks. However, there are simply too many VPN users on the platform, so the company would be cutting into their own profits.
In the meantime, premium VPN providers can simply acquire new IP ranges for their subscribers, and the cat-and-mouse game will carry on. Netflix will try to filter out VPNs, while the latter will figure out new and creative ways to bypass those filters. Not many VPN providers are successful in this endeavor, though. Free VPNs in particular are fairly easily blocked, as they can’t afford to keep buying up IPs.
If you’re unsure of your options, visit the link at the start of this article and you’ll find several excellent providers that currently work on Netflix. StreamCatcher will also show you all the regions that stream RuPaul’s Drag Race. Once you connect to a server in one of those countries, just refresh the Netflix page, get your popcorn ready, and enjoy!
