VPNs are often sold as the ultimate skeleton key to global streaming, but my recent testing proved that the reality is far more complicated.
Live events are the biggest test of any VPN’s streaming capabilities because there’s no safety net. You can’t rely on caches or pre-loaded content, and the slightest connection drop can make the biggest difference. So, naturally, I threw live sports at some of the very best VPNs to see how they’d cope.
To my surprise, no VPN was perfect, and each had its own set of challenges. Even NordVPN — our best streaming VPN — sometimes left me scratching my head. Throughout my testing, three specific issues became increasingly apparent. So, if you’re thinking of picking up a VPN for streaming anytime soon, these are the lessons I learned the hard way.
Ads are a killer
While many streaming services don’t have dedicated ad breaks, the ones that do create much more work for a VPN. Platforms like NOW TV, which stream the ad breaks as part of the main broadcast, are fine; it’s the services that drop ads in separately that cause headaches.
The biggest culprit I found was Peacock. Loading any kind of live sport triggers an instant ad section that would repeatedly cause the stream to glitch, often failing to load the live event at all. Once I’d got past the ad, a pop-up would often suggest an ad-blocker was causing the problems. However, testing it with ad-blockers on and off rarely seemed to change much.
In our controlled testing environment, our VPN Technical Editor, Mike Williams, noted similar findings. Australian streaming services 9Now, 10Play, and 7plus — all of which are ad-based — regularly caused problems for even the best streaming VPNs. While these were often minor teething issues, there were several occasions where the streaming services wouldn’t work with a VPN whatsoever.
Even the best VPNs struggle
Only a few months ago, I re-reviewed NordVPN and reaffirmed its place at the top of our best streaming rankings.
While I stand by that verdict, a few asterisks are beginning to form in my mind — ones that apply to all VPNs.
With NordVPN specifically, one issue stood out. Once I’d eventually gotten through the problems with ads, I rarely found myself with a consistent, premium viewing experience. While it was by far the best of any VPN I tested, I’d still see occasional jittery patches and pixelation that reminded me I wasn’t streaming this as any other person would.
It’s near impossible to pin down a direct cause for this. Surfshark, the fastest VPN overall, had even more problems, as did ExpressVPN and Proton. While it’s likely that there are some extremely technical reasons for each of these VPNs, it’s clear that no one has completely cracked the live streaming formula yet.
Streaming optimization is futile
“Streaming optimized servers” is often a term thrown around by VPNs as their solution to streaming issues. The problem is that everything I’ve seen over the years of using VPNs suggests they make little to no difference.
Private Internet Access, PIA, is one of the biggest VPNs to still offer dedicated streaming servers rather than optimizing its entire network. However, when I compared these servers to its standard VPN servers with several streaming services, the non-optimized servers came out on top. American services, in particular, offered an easier experience without the supposed optimization. So, the question remains, what do these optimizations actually do?
Even with VPNs that claim to optimize their entire network, the results were underwhelming. VPNs often say that WireGuard is the best protocol for streaming or that UDP is superior to TCP. Yet no combination I tried created a streaming experience so seamless that I’d forget a VPN was connected.
The everyday reality of streaming with a VPN
The biggest hurdle you’ll face isn’t necessarily the software, though. Instead, it’s the fact that no two internet connections are entirely the same. While Mike Williams tests VPNs to the max using a ten-gigabit connection, I wrote this using roughly 1/20 of that bandwidth on a good day.
Did you know?
You can find all of the best streaming VPNs in our dedicated guide. These VPNs perform well with online content catalogues such as those from Netflix and Prime Video.
This means that for your specific setup, a $30 VPN may do just as good a job as an $80 VPN. There isn’t a magic formula we can suggest to guarantee any result. That’s why we test across a variety of types of internet connections and speeds to ensure we’re happy with how we rank our VPNs.
Right now, NordVPN is by far the best, but after my last week of testing, there are several VPNs coming surprisingly close. Plus, these issues have only been exaggerated by watching live events. I’ve rarely seen anything close to this when streaming from a catalogue of content as you’d find on Netflix or Prime Video. So, most of the time, your favorite VPN will probably perform admirably.
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