The MAIN reason for using a VPN is for information security. It reduces the ability for parties to snoop on/steal your internet traffic by encrypting your data, and also offers a degree of anonymity by hiding your ip address from the world. It's the internet equivalent of having a password on your device. A minor side benefit of this, but far from the most important reason to use a VPN, is that you can spoof your location to sign up for things like iFollow, but as you say, there are plenty of ways to get content for free. You may want to use a VPN to hide the fact that you are illegally accessing certain internet services though. Some ISPs block these sort of sites. KCom are really lax in that though. One word of warning though. Never use a free VPN as they may sell your activity on which is how they can give you it free. Also, some paid providers will give your data to the government/police on request. Research which ones don't before signing up if this is important to you.
There are numerous sites offering sports. For TV, whether it be HBO, Hulu, Netflix, Prime, BBV, AppleTv, it is really easy to set up automated download processes from the internet and then display on a media server, say, like Plex.
... unless you wanted to watch something like BBC i-player, or UK Netflix. BTW, what was the answer to your question? I have a car but no bicycle.
URGENT QUESTION... Any ex-pats having problems using a VPN to access live BBC channels today? I'm in Canada as you might guess Worked fine early uk time this morning but this pm I'm blocked? EDIT: Problem fixed! Don't panic
Thanks for your input John. FYI , which may help if it happens again at your end: I sent them an e-mail describing the issue, and amazingly they responded within 3 hours with some suggestions. I think the techie help desk may have been in France somewhere given his name. Impeccable English - may have been an AI based techie working on keywords? I'd already told him I could stream live ITV and UK ch4 ok & that the BBC recognized I was using a VPN because my IP address was "masked"- whatever that means? - He first suggested trying the other UK servers available on the setup - there are 4 server locales in the UK on the VPN service I use. None would let me stream any of the Beeb channels on iPlayer. I'd already done that before I contacted them initially. - His other suggestion was to clear cache & cookies, which I also had done a couple of times after rebooting my system (Win 10 desktop) before my request to them. I then, after his response, cleared cache a couple of times after a reboot and this time it worked !! It's still a mystery as to exactly what really happened - especially as the message on the BBC about a VPN "masking my IP " was the first time I had ever seen it ?? Odd to say the least.
Not an expert in this, but I believe that the sites which work hard to stop VPN use (not many do) will sometimes detect an IP address of a VPN server then block use of it which is why switching to others will sometimes work. Also, I had read that the BBC were one of the most active at trying to detect VPN usage.
