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Circumvent blocks by streaming services

David Wibergh, about Announcements

Streaming services such as Netflix, Hulu and others are often forced by copyright owners to block VPN services in order to ensure that only residents of a specific country and watch their content.

While OVPN's focus is on security and integrity, we do realize that many people also want to use our service to circumvent geoblocked content and gain access to various streaming services.

Therefore, we have spent a lot of the past couple of months actively developing new functionality which will allow our customers to circumvent geoblocks put in place by streaming services.

How it works

When you connect to one of our servers with Streaming services activated, all traffic towards specified streaming services such as Netflix and Hulu will be redirected towards temporary rented servers. They are rented so that if one of them gets blocked we can easily replace it with a new one.

The redirection is automatic and function similar to our Multihop add-on; that is, your traffic gets encrypted and is sent towards the VPN server you are connected to, and if the server sees that the traffic is headed towards a streaming service, it will be redirected towards the rented VPN server dedicated for streaming optimization.

The way this is handled is that the VPN server you are connected to will create a new VPN tunnel between the VPN server  you are connected to and the rented VPN server using the VPN protocol Wireguard through which streaming traffic will be sent.

This ensures you remain secure even though the VPN servers are rented; the streaming service will believe your traffic originates from the rented VPN server, and the rented VPN server will believe that your traffic originates from the original VPN server to which you connected. All traffic that is not heading towards a streaming service will still use the normal VPN servers just like it always has.

Services that work currently

Right now we have implemented support for almost all major Swedish streaming services such as TV4 Play, SVT Play, Cmore, Viaplay, HBO Max, Amazon Prime, and more. You can connect to any of our Swedish servers for access to these.

We've also included support for BBC iPlayer, Channel 5, Netflix, as well as some other streaming services on our London server.

Our servers in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland has support for most major German-speaking streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, DAZN and RTL.

As for our USA servers, they too have support for several major streaming services such as Disney+ and Amazon Prime, as well as some more niche streaming services like Crynchyroll.

David Wibergh