O brother where art you?

February 16, 2025 10:03 PM

I’m currently outside the US, my normal location. I have Mullvad VPN and it functions as expected for certain streamers (e.g., Peacock). Others (Prime, ESPN) detect the VPN and refuse to perform unless I disable it, but then of course it also refuses to perform. Why do people suggest VPNs if they frequently don’t function?
posted by billsaysthis to Computers & Internet (7 answers total)

Streamers have a very large incentive to stay one step ahead of VPN's, which do not forget are technically fraudulent for what you're trying to use them for (no judgment here - I'm just saying, they violate every streamer's TOS). It'll always be a game of whack-a-mole, particularly for streamers that carry live sports, which are the most valuable properties on streaming, whether that's what you use them for or not. So it's not that people are suggesting wrong, or are suggesting bad VPN's; it's just that VPN's can't always keep up with the anti-VPN tactics streamers use.
posted by pdb at 10:15 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]

It's not hard for a streaming site to figure out which IP address ranges a VPN is using and block them. In the simplest case you just sign up for a VPN, access your own site, and there you have it, the address of the VPN machine, ready to add to a blocklist. In reality there are almost certainly services that do this for the streaming sites.

So it's a constant churn of VPN providers renting machines in netblocks that haven't been blocked yet, and the services getting around to finding out.
posted by Rhomboid at 10:21 PM on February 16 [1 favorite]

What people above have said and also the fact that your VPN does work for some streaming services says more negative things about their technical teams than it does positive things about the VPN provider.

The more popular your VPN provider, the more likely it is to be blocked for streaming services. But bear in mind that using a VPN for streaming is like using a car for racing. It's fun but it's not the primary point of the invention. VPNs were/are primarily used to secure network traffic for business and latterly to protect people from shonky public wifi practices.

Whether you can successfully use them to cheat the ToS of your streaming service isn't a good indicator of whether the VPN "doesn't function".
posted by underclocked at 11:43 PM on February 16 [2 favorites]

Why do people suggest VPNs if they frequently don’t function?

Most of the people you hear suggesting VPNs have been paid by a VPN provider to suggest them.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 4:11 AM on February 17 [4 favorites]

It doesn't help people who reside outside of their target country but for travellers going thru the effort of self hosting a VPN will stop the counter measures because the traffic is coming from your own house.
posted by Mitheral at 5:11 AM on February 17

I use a VPN for one very specific task that is not streaming. When there is a block, I generally just switch countries and the block is gone.
posted by soelo at 6:50 AM on February 17

Response by poster: @Mitheral this is what I thought and why I set up Tailscale (I know I didn’t mention this previously) but it too was detected as a VPN.

Thanks for the answers though.
posted by billsaysthis at 8:24 PM on February 17