No, this is not about Internet censorship in countries like China or Pakistan where ISPs frequently block access to sites like YouTube following Government orders.
YouTube Videos Blocked
You could be staying in a country like US, UK or India but may not be able to watch every video on YouTube – that’s because the content owners have allowed access to that video only from certain countries or geographic regions.
If your computer’s IP address falls outside that geographic region, YouTube will display an error saying “This video is not available in your country” – this message has nothing to do with censorship, it’s the owner of the video clip who could be limiting access.
YouTube Filters in Action
For instance, this video clip (Armor For Sleep – Hold The Door), uploaded to YouTube by Warner Brothers, is probably not available outside US. Similarly, this BBC clip (Stop Calling it a Honeymoon) on YouTube can only be watched from UK.
BBC has mentioned the reason behind region filtering on their official BBC Channel – “Because of the way that the BBC is funded in the UK through the license fee, we cannot make videos available outside of the UK”. Similarly the Olympic Games channel on YouTube (youtube.com/beijing2008) is blocked in countries like US because NBC has a deal to stream Olympic Games Live in those countries.
How to bypass YouTube Region Filtering ?
YouTube uses your computer IP address to determine your physical location / country. In order to bypass these country-specific restrictions on YouTube, try this trick:
If the URL of the YouTube video is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEwD36Dk1jw – just replace the /watch?v= part with /v so your new URL becomes http://www.youtube.com/v/yEwD36Dk1jw
The other trick is that you type the YouTube video URL inside Google Translate and use this a free Google Proxy Server. Read some more ways to access blocked websites.