Daniel C.
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Verified by
Sander D.
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Last updated:
July 23, 2024
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(0)
Pandora is the perfect example of a so-called geo-restricted online service. This means that you can only listen to it by default in a select few countries, these being the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. Obviously, the rest of the world is closed out, but there is a back entrance to the concert. Smart DNS services are designed explicitly to provide access to streaming websites that are restricted in some way or another. As it happens, such domains are more strictly regulated by law, as music, film and video on demand are more often subjects of copyright infringement. A smart DNS service is a legal solution that will get you to sites and services like Pandora.
The crude geological restrictions that Pandora imposes have a very simple reason behind it: U.S. law. To have the streaming service hosted in any other country, their leaders must agree with 1998’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act. So far, on the aforementioned four resolved to do so. Others, like China or North Korea have more reasons not to allow Pandora inside their borders. The relative cultural isolationism enforced in these states prevent most non-local stimuli to gain ground and thus Pandora – perceived to be a manifestation of “western” culture in China and North Korea – would probably be banned even if the leaders of these countries agreed with the DMCA law.
It might also be possible within the four countries that allow the service that the application used to listen to Pandora’s music selection is blocked, locally. Some ISPs or public Wi-Fi spots for example are not always keen on people having access to the non-selective streaming of Pandora. Verizon subscribers in the USA had some related problems, for example.
Since Pandora is first and foremost a streaming service, it requires a good amount of your bandwidth for you to listen to music over extended periods. Smart DNS companies specialize in providing access to several hundred streaming sites, including Pandora, while not slowing down your internet speed. This way, you can get to enjoy these contents from anywhere in the world on most devices used for internet access today. Alternatively, routers are the single most supported machines for smart DNS. They are extremely useful in distributing smart DNS signal across a shorter distance, creating opportunities for multiple devices to be connected to a network.
Smart DNS works based on the temporary change of DNS addresses. The address you change to lets you access streaming websites in the countries the given company supports. The most favored countries in this matter are the USA and the UK, so you should have no problem connecting to Pandora.
As an alternative, we would like to spare a few words for VPN services. This is more of a general purpose solution: while smart DNS supports a list of sites only, VPN grants access to the total online content of a given country. It also uses encryptions that will provide a safer connection. However, this security solution greatly reduces the connection speeds of your connection, something that is necessary for smart DNS.
Because of the above, we found that for streaming in a strict sense, smart DNS companies are a better option. Therefore, we would like to present three of them. First up, Blockless is an exceptional company. They are renowned for the user-friendly environment provided to the customer. If you have a browser of any kind, you are ready to go: Blockless has its own interface designed to run on them, and you can connect to one of the 30 countries the organization offers with the push of a button. If you are interested, a standard one-week free trial awaits you.
As it often happens with smart DNS services, they play a minor role when a company offers it and a VPN simultaneously. OverPlay is a black horse in this matter; the company offers both smart DNS and VPN, but the balance is more or less equal between them. The number of servers is a great strength of OverPlay, and for websites like Pandora or Netflix there is also a JetSwitch tool at your disposal, allowing you to alternate between the country-based variants of streaming services. The company has a 1-day trial version, free of charge.
Lastly, we present ibDNS. Another VPN-DNS pair, though things go about a bit more different. This organization has about 20 different pricing plans and a good half of them include their smart DNS as well. Considering that most of the competition has just one this is really impressive. As a standalone buy, ibDNS is more or less a standard choice. But together with VPN, you should be filled with internet freedom for sure. The only downside is that you can utilize a mere 6 hours of free trial time.
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