Comment by alberth

Recently I watch the Scotties Tournament of Hearts[1].

I paid for a monthly subscription to the Canadian streaming provider (TSN), since I live in Canada.

For whatever reason, there was no international streaming provider. (It has been on ESPN in previous years.)

The ads on the TSN stream were horrific. They put a full 25% of the active play of every game (the first thrower in every end) in a muted PIP box so they could play more full-screen ads.

TSN decided to offer a stream of the playoff games to non-Canadian viewers who had no way of watching, and since pay-for TSN is geoblocked to Canada, they made that stream free, and geoblocked it to not play in Canada.

The international stream was also free of commercial breaks. Instead of commercials it just showed miscellaneous cameras between ends, and showed the entire ends without putting a quarter of them in a PIP box.

So obviously, my experience was much better by streaming the international stream rather than the local stream that I paid for.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scotties_Tournament_of_Hearts

- There are countries, and ISPs in some countries, that block or throttle access to commonly used websites.

- You can get cheaper rates on some travel expenses, such as car rentals, by changing your IP to one in a different geo.

To have a fixed internet point of presence, when frequently travelling. Otherwise, all kinds of services start complaining that you're logging in from a new location.

My local ISP throttles YouTube.

VPN bypasses that entirely, despite my traffic traveling to another continent on the other hemisphere.

All depends on who it is that is deciding what is questionable and what is not.

I have had multiple problems with ISPs throttling/prioritizing traffic, such as games. In one case I had ping times to the steam servers that were so bad the game DC'd about every 5 minutes. Popped everything into a VPN endpoint in my own city and suddenly everything worked smoothly and flawlessly. And this wast not a high bandwidth game by any means. This has happened multiple times.

Also, hosting stuff at my house. Multiple times had ISPs that appeared to be degrading incoming connections where once again popping everything into a VPN tunnel fixed any problems. (for example when I set up a streaming website from my house with a webcam of our kittens to watch from work. Stream kept getting interrupted randomly until I routed it through a VPN)

I tend to use VPS based solutions rather than commercial VPN providers, but I've done both.

TL;DR: ISPs are shifty and untrustworthy.

I would like to watch Japanese commercials and trailers for things i'd like to watch -- but Japanese publishers are big on region locking on the streaming sites, so I circumvent the issues with VPNs.

Questionable? Maybe; but I don't really feel personally beholden to copyright/trademark law that isn't preventing a loss anywhere -- in many cases when I watch these trailers I make purchases based upon them, so if anything the corporations that region-lock their YouTube videos away from other markets are doing more damage than I -- the extra diligent customer.

If you need an absolutely vanilla answer : I VPN into a network node that can access other nodes that only host their services to the local network. That's also a big advantage, and as far as I know it doesn't step on any legal toes.

To access my home network?