Spotify, Pandora, Netflix, and Hulu outside The United States

These are three of the most popular sites in the world. Why? Simply because they're awesome. What makes them awesome? Well, they solve a lot of problems, for a lot of people.

For example, people love downloading movies, music, and TV on the internet. Most of us at one time or another have downloading some kind of media. Free is better, and you've probably heard of torrents. If not, you've heard of Napster, and maybe The Pirate Bay, and all the problems related to internet piracy. There are two sides to the story - what "stealing" is and what it isn't, but I don't want to get into that.

The point is that people download music and movies on the internet regardless of whether it's legal or not. This makes the media corporations and some artists angry.

Hulu, Pandora, and Spotify solve the problem for both parties.

They provide free TV, movies, and music for everyone, plus they pay the artists and the corporations. How do they do this? With a bit of advertising. Yes. Companies will pay thousands, if not millions of dollars for a few seconds between songs, or a small square of advertising space. I'm sure Pandora and Spotify pay just a few cents per song (or less), but with the millions of people who tune in every day, that adds up. Basically, everyone is happy.

You get FREE music, and everyone gets paid.

Netflix is unfortunately not free. There are lots of movies on Hulu, but Hulu just doesn't have the selection of Netflix.

Even though it's not free, Netflix still fixes the problem of price and convenience of watching movies. For eight USD per month, you can access a database of tens of thousands of movies. More movies that you could ever watch. Why pay a few dollars to rent one movie for a few days, when you can pay a few dollars and get access to thousands? Exactly. The choice is a no-brainer.

But here's the problem. They're only available in The US. All the advertising, copyright agreements, contracts, and bla bla bla means that only people in The US can get access (Hulu is now in Japan, Netflix in Canada and Brazil, and Spotify in some places in Europe).

Virtual private networks solve this problem. A VPN help you change the IP address of your phone or computer. You can even route your laptop to your internet TV (like Apple TV) to get an American IP address, and access to these sites. Imagine that!

You could bang your head to Pandora tunes in France. You can watch Glee in China. You can stream Pulp Fiction from Panama. You can access your custom playlists waiting for a bus in Israel.

It's no joke - it really works. I live in China and access this stuff all the time.

Plus, some services allow you to switch IP address for free, and as many times as you wish, with several countries available. That means you an access content from other countries as well. I just know that BBC iPlayer is popular in The UK, but I'm sure that there are TV/Music/Movie streaming sites for just about every country. You can access local content available on these sites. This could be a great way to learn a language, or it may be more specific to your interests because you're from that country.