The sports industry is massive. There are thousands of sports all around the world. From football to rugby, and basketball, you can pick and choose which sports you have an interest in. It’s incredibly easy to follow any sport these days thanks to the internet. You can do a quick Google search to catch up on results, or you can install the app on your smartphone to get live notifications as the game plays out.
Watching these sports is much more difficult though. The world used to rely on cable TV to watch sports — cable TV always had a very limited selection of sports based on your geographic location and the channels that are available on your cable TV provider. Once again though, the internet has made it much easier to watch sports no matter where you are. You can live stream sports using a laptop, smartphone, or tablet even if you’re not at home. Whether you’re traveling, out shopping, or having lunch somewhere, you can tune into your favouritefavorite sport at any time.
Online streaming also allows you to tune into any sport in the world — something that could never be done before. However, if you try to stream content from a different country, you will run into some problems. Geo-blocking restrictions will prevent you from accessing the content in other countries and regions worldwide, and you will struggle to tune into a sportssport live stream. Luckily though, you can use a virtual private network (VPN) to hop over these digital fences and watch any sport from anywhere in the world. The only way for this to work is if you’re using some of the best VPNs for sports streaming, so keep reading to find out how you can pinpoint the best choice of VPN.
Geo-blocking Restrictions
Since sports live streaming has become a more popular option, you would think that it’s become much easier to live-stream sports in different countries around the world. However, it’s become incredibly difficult to stream sports from other countries, even if you’re a paying subscriber to the local broadcasting company. The biggest obstacle that you would face when trying to stream sports abroad is geo-blocking restrictions. As frustrating as they are, they exist for a good reason.
Media companies such as ESPN need to pay huge amounts of money to secure broadcasting rights from a sporting federation that allows them to live stream the content to their customers. Acquiring these broadcasting rights gives the media company the ability to stream the matches live, but they also come with a strict set of rules. One of the main rules is that they are not allowed to stream the content outside of their approved country or region.
This is mainly done to prevent any single media company from establishing a monopoly on the broadcasting rights of a sport. Larger companies can pay more money and have more customers streaming their content, whereas the smaller companies wouldn’t be able to keep up with the costs or the popularity of the bigger companies. In addition, sporting federations make more money when selling their broadcasting rights to multiple media companies rather than just one large company.
Websites use your IP address to determine your geographic location, and based on this information they will block you from accessing their live stream if you’re not in the approved country or region. For example, if you’re in Australia and try to stream NBA on ESPN your access to the live stream will be blocked. This is frustrating, especially if you’re just visiting Australia as a tourist and want to watch your favouritefavorite sports back home.
But luckily, there is a way that you can bypass geo-blocking restrictions and tune into any sport no matter where you are in the world.
Watching Sports Live Streams For Free
You can use a virtual private network, also known as a VPN short if you want to bypass geo-blocking restrictions. It’s the perfect tool for streaming content that is not available in your country or region because it can hide your true location and trick websites into thinking that you’re accessing it from elsewhere — we’ll explore how that works shortly.
Let’s first look into the primary purpose of a VPN (it is a cybersecurity tool after all). VPNs are designed to encrypt your internet connection which will prevent anyone else from seeing what you’re doing while browsing the internet. You can browse the internet completely anonymously while using a VPN, and you can mask your internet activity from the government, your internet service provider, and even some cybercriminals that are out to get innocent victims on the internet. Keep this in mind because it’s a key factor that will help you to watch sports for free.
VPNs also have secure global servers that you can connect to. Each of these servers is situated in a different city or country around the world. When you connect to one of these servers, your real IP address will be hidden from any websites that you visit. Remember, your IP address is the unique identifier that websites use to determine your device’s location. Hiding this IP address will also hide your location. The VPN will then direct your internet traffic through the server that you have connected to, which will make it appear as if your device is accessing the internet from the same location as the server that you are connected to. For example, you can connect to a server in the United States and trick the ESPN website into thinking that you’re in the U.S. and this will allow you to bypass geo-blocking restrictions.
So, here’s how you can start saving money on sports live streams. Some countries around the world have free sports live streams available for anyone within their regions or borders. You can access these live streams if you use your VPN to connect to the relevant server and trick the streaming site into thinking you’re accessing it from the correct region.
There are also some free sports live-streaming sites on the internet that you can use. Websites such as 123Sport will stream sports from all over the world for free. However, they do not host live streams, which means that you can’t be sure of the true source of their live streams — it could be a cybercriminal hosting the stream and trying to lure in unsuspecting victims.
Using The Right VPN
There are hundreds of VPNs that you could potentially choose from — but this is a more important decision than you might expect. There are some key factors that you need to keep in mind when deciding on which VPN you’re going to use.
The most important rule that you need to keep in mind is that you should always use a premium VPN. It’s tempting to use a free VPN to save some extra cash, but ultimately it’s not worth it. Free VPNs come with some serious drawbacks that will affect your streaming experience. If you’re using a free VPN you’ll run into intrusive ads, slower connection speeds, weaker encryption technology, and daily bandwidth limits. You won’t run into any of these problems if you’re using a premium VPN.
