You're sitting in a hotel in Bangkok, the cricket is on at home, you open the Kayo app. It loads… and then it doesn't. "Service is only available in Australia." You paid for it. You're you. Why has the app suddenly forgotten who you are?

Welcome to geo-blocking. It's one of the most common reasons people start looking into VPNs — and one of the most misunderstood.

How services know where you are

Every device on the internet has an IP address — a network number that, among other things, broadly identifies which country you're connecting from. When you open Kayo or Stan or ABC iView, the app checks your IP address against a list of allowed countries. If you're not in one of them, the app politely refuses to play.

That isn't the streaming service being mean. It's because most streaming content is licensed by country. Stan has paid for rights to show certain shows in Australia, not in Thailand. ABC iView is funded by Australian taxpayers for Australians. Kayo's rights deals with sporting bodies are geographically scoped. The technology has to enforce what the contracts say.

What a VPN does about it

A VPN routes your traffic through a server in a country you choose. To the streaming service, you appear to be connecting from wherever that server is. Connect to an Australian server and you appear to be in Australia — even if you're sipping a beer in Phuket.

For an Aussie traveller, that's the obvious use case: keep your home-country subscriptions working while you're away. The shows you already pay for don't suddenly become unavailable just because you crossed a time zone.

The honest caveats

We try to be straight with our customers, so a few things to know:

Streaming services' terms of service often prohibit using a VPN. Most of them won't enforce it for an Aussie connecting from overseas to a home server — you're using a subscription you paid for, in the country you paid for it from. But it's their service and their rules. Read your provider's terms if you want certainty.

Some streaming services actively block known VPN IPs. If you connect to a server they've blocked, the app may still refuse to load. Picking a different server usually fixes it.

You can't reverse-stream. A VPN won't unlock content from a country whose rights the service hasn't purchased — only what they're licensed to show in the country you appear to be in.

It's not just streaming

Streaming is the obvious example, but a lot of Australian services do the same thing. Your bank may show a different login flow or block you outright. Your MyGov sessions may behave oddly. Some news sites paywall content for non-Australian visitors. Even your favourite recipe app might serve different content. Connecting to an Australian VPN server makes most of these snap back to normal.

How to set yourself up

  1. Install your VPN before you leave Australia. Some app stores aren't accessible from every country.
  2. Test at home. Connect to an Australian server, then open the apps you'll want overseas. Confirm they work.
  3. Pick a city close to you, not just “Australia”. A Sydney or Melbourne server will usually be faster from Asia than one further away.
  4. Connect to the VPN first, then open the app. Most apps cache the location for a while — if you connect to the VPN after opening the app, you may need to force-close and reopen.
  5. If one server doesn't work, try another. Streaming services do play whack-a-mole with VPN IPs. It's usually a server-picker problem, not a "VPN is broken" problem.

The point

Your Aussie subscriptions don't have to stay home when you do. A VPN keeps the apps you pay for working the way you expect them to — on hotel Wi-Fi, on foreign carriers, on the other side of the world.

Arresti VPN works on iPhone, iPad, Android, macOS, Windows and Linux. One subscription covers up to 5 devices. Sign up here — AUD $3.99/month, with a 30-day money-back guarantee.