VPNs used most to avoid geo-restrictions
July 9, 2018
A VPN usage report by GlobalWebIndex confirms that accessing geo-restricted entertainment content continues to be the main motivation for VPN users.
While preserving anonymity is important for North American VPN users, access to better entertainment or to content unavailable in their home territory drives VPN usage in all other regions.
With 49 per cent using VPNs mainly to bypass geo-restrictions on content, this remains a huge issue for studios, sports leagues, rightsholders and premium broadcasters who rely on territory-based licensing to fund their productions and operations.
Commenting on the report, GeoGuard CEO David Briggs states: “The VPN problem is not going away and continues to erode the value of content for studios, sports leagues and premium broadcasters. Content producers and broadcasters rely on territorial-based licensing for their revenues and by not enforcing geo-restrictions, they put the ongoing viability of their business at risk. The good news is that effective VPN and DNS proxy detection and blocking is available and, with our recent integration with Akamai CDN, very easy to implement.”