Dean Daley and I recently went to San Fransisco to cover the launch of Samsung’s S23 series smartphones, and much to our surprise, Bell’s Crave streaming service seemed to work on our iPads while in the United States.
This is strange because usually when I’m in the U.S., I can’t access Crave since other U.S.-based streaming services hold the rights to most of its content and because of this, the platform is region-locked to Canada.
When testing Crave out on my laptop, it didn’t work, but the iPad app skirts the region-lock for some reason. Dean and I used an iPad mini, with mine on 5G and his on Wi-Fi. The MacBook I tested this on was also on Wi-Fi.
There’s no way to say for sure if this is a bug, but if you want to catch up on the latest episodes of The Last of Us in the U.S., this might be a simple way. I’m reasonably sure the last time I tried to watch Crave in the U.S. on an iPad was at WWDC in the summer, so something within the Crave app seems to have changed since then.
I’ll also mention that I was able to watch content on Paramount+ on my iPad for a few days of my trip, and then on the last night, it stopped working and I was locked out.
Have you been able to watch Crave on an iPad when outside of Canada? Let us know in the comments below.