We as a civilization have built this incredible thing called the Internet, a vast data network connecting people from all parts, even the remotest, of the world. While technically there are no borders on the Internet, people, government, and corporations have placed artificial gates across the global network. For example, not every single video on YouTube is available to people, depending on where you live.
The dreaded “The uploader has not made this video available in your country” message appears because corporations have paid money for digital distribution rights for that particular country. Those corporations don’t want you to see that content on YouTube, they want you to see on their (most likely paid) platform. This problem is particularly evident in Canada where many popular YouTube clips are not available.
There have been many harebrained and inconvenient solutions to this problem but none have been as easy and slick as the one I found last week. The site YouPak allows you to view any YouTube video no matter where you are visiting from. The site seems to know whenever any YouTube video has been uploaded, so it looks essentially like a mirror of the actual YouTube site. It also contains all the meta-info for the original YouTube video, including comments.
As an example, try to view this video if you’re in Canada. Nope, you won’t be able to. I’ve been able to embed that video though above by going through YouPak.
If you ever encounter a YouTube video that has been blocked from your country, Canada or otherwise, just replace “youtube” in the URL with “youpak” and your video will be available.
Let’s make the Internet more global again.