Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's been a few years since I've used a VPN with streaming, but I recall some services not working well with it. I was in Australia with NordVPN to the US on a fibre connection.
Yea it all depends on if the service allows it. Netflix commonly showed me a “sorry you’re using a vpn so disable it” message and no amount of new sessions or incognito windows or exit nodes would fix it. Perhaps this has changed since that time, but I imagine it’s more likely a pacification measure to streaming services to point to for rights holders and if it “accidentally breaks” all the time, they can point the b…
> Perhaps this has changed
It is an ongoing arms race. Sometimes the VPN providers are winning, sometimes the streaming services make a temporarily successful counter-offensive, sometimes the battleground is a mess with things working for some mixes of vpn/country/streamer but not others.⁰
The streaming services block the address ranges of known data-centres, though not commercial addresses more generally because there is often enough a cross-over between residential and commercial ISP accounts¹² so that is one workaround VPN providers can use in their choice of exit points (though bandwidth can be significantly more expensive that way than from a DC).
I'm not aware of it actually being done, but I'd not be surprised to find a less ethical VPN business hasn't tried to use their customers as a mesh and redirecting traffic around them as needed much like botnets use compromised hosts to forward requests. There are obvious technical difficulties here that make it a less practical idea³ but I can imagine someone trying it.
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[0] Reference: I don't use a VPN this way myself, preferring the other major unlicensed media access route, bit I know a few people who do with varying levels of success over time.
[1] My home account is essentially a commercial one as that is the ISPs main customer base, I use them for a number of reasons (fixed IPv4 that I can run servers off, in fact a /29 of v4 addresses though that is a lot less important to me now than it was some years ago, native IPv6 which is still no commonplace here (though I still haven't set that up properly after all this time!), much better support when things fail, so I'm not the one spending time chasing BT OR, etc.)
[2] Similarly, many small offices actually run their access off what is targetted as a residential account. And small businesses based in/around a home are another grey area.
[3] In many places most residential users have significantly asymmetric bandwidth, throttling their ability to be used as a relay, and a mix of accounts from different countries looking to come from the same address might trip the streaming services' account anomaly detection heuristics.