If you haven’t been living under the rock, you might have noticed many websites are geo-restricted. For instance, HULU, Spotify, Pandora etc. are only available on US, while BBC iPlayer is only available in UK.

Now, there are 2 ways, any website find out where you are browsing from - your IP address and your browser’s location.

While you can easily change the IP address, by using our VPN and Smart DNS, it’s not easy to change browser location.

For example, the other day, I was browsing CBS with a Smart DNS Proxy VPN, and everything worked find. But, when I decided to watch some local channels on CBS, it showed me a popup asking for my browser location. And when click on Allow, it says the content is not available in my location.

Up till now, I was using “Manual Geolocation” Chrome extension to fix this problem, but after the new “HTML 5 Geolocation API” update, none of these extensions seems to work.

But like always, I dug in deep and found out solution to change your location to an American one in Google Chrome.

Here is how it works.

To test this, let’s go to mylocation.org and here you can see, to types of location - public IP address and browser geolocation. As you can see, there two types of location. The public IP address can easily be changed with the VPN. So, if I turn on my Smart DNS Proxy VPN and switch to US, now come back to the page and refresh it. As, you can see the IP address has successfully changed to that of the US. But the browser location is still the same.

To fix that, open developer console or inspect element, by right clicking on the screen.

At the bottom of the panel, press the three-dot button on the top right, and then click the “Sensors” option from More. Under Geolocation, select “Custom location.”

Now put in your location based on latitude and longitude, if you don’t know these values, you can always use Google maps. Or just select any name of city of the state like California. Now, reload the page, allow location data in the pop-up window, and you’ll see that the map zeroes into the location you selected. And as you can see, the browser location has changed to California. Unfortunately, there is no permanent way to change location in Chrome, the extension used to make it easy, but they don’t work now. So, I guess, you’ll have to do this manually each time.

Now, let’s put it to test. Open CBS in incognito mode and login in to your account. Next, change the browser GPS location with same workaround. And now if I refresh the page, and click on allow location, as you can see, I’m now able to stream local stations. How cool is that.

The same workaround works for Android as well, for example, I’m not able to completely use Sling TV app outside US, if I don’t give it location permission. Simply, download a fake GPS app from Play Store, give it permission from the developer settings. Set the location to California and run it. Now, if I open the Sling app and give it location permission, everything should work just fine.

So, there you go. This is how you manually set up your location in Google Chrome and Android.

Hopefully, this will help you to stream your favorite local channels or access your favorite service from any part of the world. Do, you know what else help you to remove geo-restriction? Smart DNS Proxy. Unlike a VPN, smart DNS doesn’t change your IP address and you can set it up on every device be it your router, PS4, Apple TV, etc. So, check out Smart DNS Proxy if keep to unblock geo-restrictions on sites like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, Pandora and what not. Check our other videos on our YouTube channel and subscribe.

Thank you for reading and watching.