Television is one of the major mass media of the United States. Ninety-nine percent of American households have at least one television and the majority of households have more than one. As a whole, the television networks of the United States are the largest and most syndicated in the world.
The orbital position of the direct-to-home satellites for North America means that they cannot be received with domestic satellite equipment around the World, they can be received in some countries neighboring the United States, such as Canada, Mexico and some areas of the Caribbean. In most cases, taking your American satellite equipment and subscription overseas, is not an option.
In most English speaking countries, American films and programs are broadcast on local TV, in many other countries they are dubbed in the local language.
A few American channels can be received in most areas of the world, CNN, the Voice Of America (VOA) and FOX News (subscription channel).
Watching Online
If you live outside the United States and want to access American TV or their websites, you will find most live streams and VOD (Video On Demand) content geographical blocked (Geoblocked).
This is used by websites like Hulu.com, Netflix.com, CBS.com, ABC.com and NBC.com, there is of course a solution to this, a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
A US VPN will allow you to browse the Internet with a US IP address and give you access to the major US networks.
There are also many sites offering US channels for a price, although many do offer a good service, take care if you decide to subscribe to one of these services.
Geoblocking
Geoblocking is a technology that is used to prevent access to web sites from visitors in particular countries or regions.
At the moment it is mainly used by traditional broadcast companies who are moving their television, radio and music content online. Because of distribution contracts with the producers of these programmes many broadcast web sites limit access to people with in their own country.
Whenever a person connects to the internet, their computer or mobile device is assigned what is called an IP address. This is a sequence of numbers in the form 255.255.255.255.
The IP address is assigned to you by the internet service provider (ISP) that you are connecting through and these in turn are assigned to the ISP in blocks.
It is therefore possible to say that a particular IP address is from a particular country or even city.
Site owners that want to use geoblocking simply choose to only allow access to a particular range of IP addresses or to block certain ranges.
US VPN (Virtual Private Network)
A US VPN account is an account that would allow you to connect to a server located in the United States. Once connected you will be assigned a US IP address and all traffic will be encrypted using PPTP or L2TP IPsec encryption. You will still need an internet connection, though you will bypass internet filtering and log keeping (if your ISP keeps logs).
Using a VPN is legal, as no re-broadcasting, copying or pirating is taking place. Once connected to a VPN network in the United States, you will be able to access most sites that restricts access to users outside the USA.
Get a US VPN from StreamVia
American Radio
In contrast to American TV, radio from the United States is freely available without restriction in most areas of the world, most restrictions. are those imposed by governments trying to restrict western influence and news in their countries.
Radio stations in the United States use “call-letters” instead of names. These call-letters usually comprise 3 or 4 letters, such as “WJR” or “KVST”. Generally speaking (with a few exceptions) those stations with call-letters beginning with “W” are located East of the Mississippi River, whilst those beginning with “K” are West of it.
There are many sites offering American radio for free, along with numerous apps for most smart phone platforms.
See American Radio
See Voice of America
