What’s cool? WatanNetwork YouTube region restriction checker
Tell me more!
This online tool lets you see check any YouTube video to see in which countries it is blocked at.
It accepts both regular YouTube links, YouTube Video ID, as well as shortened YouTube.
Where is it?: WatanNetwork YouTube region restriction checker | Check YouTube Video Region Restrictions Online
This is one among many items I regularly tag in Pinboard as cooltech, and automatically autoshares as #cogdogcooltech to Twitter and Mastodon. Now the Coolness is in OEG Connect 
Have you ever been to Cool? Do you know of something cool I should share? Just reply below and I will check it out.
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I ran into this situation recently with an embedded YouTube video in the OER shared with us recently on OEG Live by @JudithSebesta
I spotted in one chapter the clip for The Road showed up as Unavailable.
I shared with Judith, who was perplexed because she could see it fine.
Then my hunch kicked in… I live in Canada, and often I find YouTube clips won’t play here (usually ones for songs or TV shows). And sure enough, I flipped my connection via a VPN tool to use a US based IP address, and I could see the video.
So the vldeo’s author had placed geographic restrictions on it. That’s not very global!
Judith has since changed the clip for one without restrictions, but I was curious how an OER author would know a clip they can see fine will not show up for someone in another country. Thus I found the WatanNetwork tool linked above.
You can see it in action with the URL for the original clip that I could not view in Canada-- https://watannetwork.com/tools/blocked/#url=WEP25kPtQCQ
Thus it shows that the movie is only available in 4 countries: Somaliland, Kosovo, N. Cyprus, and the United States (curious choices there!)
This ought to be useful for making sure any YouTube videos used in your work are globally available.
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This is some great detective work, Alan! Thanks so much. Very informative and helpful.
