One of the best reasons to start using a VPN is to hide your geographical location. You might want to do this for a variety of reasons, and being able to watch sports events you’re locked out of thanks to the country you’re trying to watch from is often top among them.
Whether it’s Premier League football, baseball, Indian cricket, top-level tennis from venues across Europe, or that weird thing the Americans call ‘football’, more and more sports are available for us to watch. Broadcasters, however, are in the habit of region-locking their sports streaming, perhaps because they don’t have the rights to show particular games outside certain areas. A VPN can help you to get around this, by masking your location and making it appear as if you’re watching from within a portion of the globe that’s able to view the sport you want.
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Hiding your location with a VPN is easy – you just have to get one installed, subscribe to it if necessary, and switch it on. Your location is tied to your IP address, and this is what broadcasters use to determine where you’re trying to watch from. If your IP address is associated with a country or region that’s not on their list of allowed locations, then you’ll be blocked from watching.
A VPN works by sitting between you and the content you’re trying to access. A sports streamer doesn’t see your IP address, but instead the one provided by the VPN server you’re connected to, which may be in a completely different country and isn’t associated with you in any way. Your connection is also encrypted, so there’s much less chance of any information that could identify you, or your country of origin, leaking out.
Where are you?
So the important thing with watching region-locked streamed sports isn’t just to hide your actual location, but to make it look as if you’re accessing the stream from somewhere the broadcaster approves of. This means selecting a VPN server carefully, so you can be sure of appearing to be in the right part of the world.
Luckily, many VPNs allow you to do just this. While free services will choose a server for you, which won’t necessarily be in the right place, if you subscribe to a VPN service you’ll find you have much greater control over which country you appear to be connecting from.
Despite this, there may be an element of trial and error in getting your sports streaming to work with a VPN. Sports streamers and broadcasters are well aware that people use VPNs to watch their content from outside the specified geographic area, and will do their best to block any IP addresses that are associated with VPN and which could be used to circumvent the restrictions. This means trying multiple servers and even VPN providers until you find a combination that works.
Once you’ve got a system that’s configured to access sports streaming from across the world, you can relax and enjoy some of the best entertainment out there. The only problem will be deciding what to watch.