It’s been over two years since the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) cemented a ban on the internet’s most popular video sharing website, YouTube.com.
Average Pakistani surfers have become accustomed to the ban, forcing them to get their daily fix of cute puppy videos and funny baby clips from alternative sites such as Dailymotion, Vimeo, Metacafe and Vevo.
But for those who are intent on watching content off the largest video sharing search engine, there are still many ways to do so…
The first and most basic method of bypassing the PTA’s ban is to use a web-based proxy; i.e. open up Google in your browser and search for “proxy” or to be more specific “YouTube proxy”. This method is recommended for those in the workplace who do not have administrator privileges or are monitored by their IT department.
The search magnate will give you results of various websites on which you can input YouTube’s address (or any other banned webpage) and allows for you to surf freely.
The downsides of using web-based proxy services are that they are usually slower than using YouTube directly, some do not allow for you to watch videos in high-quality, and seeking (rewinding & forwarding) through videos might cause the video to restart from the beginning, which stings if you’ve just spent 5 minutes waiting for the video to buffer.
We recommend using YouTubeunblocker.org as it allows you to select the video quality and player type if you are using an older browser that does not support HTML 5.
For home users, the ZenMate extension for Google Chrome will revolutionize your surfing experience and unlock all cyber-doors placed by our respective regulatory authorities.
You simply install the add-on from the Chrome store and once it’s enabled in your browser you can access YouTube as if there was no ban at all. This add-on allows you to select what region you want to use as a proxy, so one can use the North American server to access region specific sites such as Hulu and Netflix, and if the North American servers are giving you slow buffering time, then one can simply select another from a list of 5 regions including: UK, Germany, Sweden and Hong Kong.
For those who are willing to spend a few dollars annually on a paid Virtual Private Network (VPN) service for personal or business use, there are many standalone software’s that can be downloaded from the internet to meet regional requirements.
So there you have it… YouTube unblocked in Pakistan 😉