Anyone using a VPN with an Amazon Fire TV stick here?

As anyone who streams TV from the UK knows, it has become more difficult since the beginning of last year (can’t think why?)…

But I have been coping reasonably well, primarily watching BBC over iPlayer (I pay the licence fee as I still have a home in the UK, though France is my primary residency - I don’t want this to be a debate about the legality of VPNs and streaming, thanks).

But just in the last week or two the reliability of the VPNs (I have two installed) on my Fire TV stick has nosedived.

Some days it works, but most days it doesn’t. Sometimes I can watch on-demand programmes but not live TV and at other times I can’t watch one channel live but can watch a different channel. This is regardless of which VPN I use.

On the other hand, with only the occasional glitch, I can use my PC to watch iPlayer using the same VPNs I have installed on the Fire TV stick (obviously, using the Windows app versions on my PC).

In fact I have even resorted to casting my laptop display to the TV - via the Fire TV Stick!

I’m probably going to convert an old router I have to open source software so I can run OpenVPN but in the mean time I was wondering of anyone else here has had the same problems and maybe found a solution.

The VPN licences I have are SurfShark and VPNUnlimited.

It is not the VPNs it is the IP addresses of the specific VPN servers so you may be connecting to different servers on different devices.
I use NordVPN on a Firestick. I haven’t had any particular problems but it depends on the IP addresses of the VPN servers you use. The BBC is known to block some VPN servers. NordVPN has a web page which they update regularly which lists their particular server IDs they know work. I think the others may do similar blocking.

It’s cat and mouse with VPN’s.

Amazon are known to be particularly aggressive with VPN’s.

The BBC is always, always hot on their trail.

So VPN’s have to kerp rolling their servers over, creating ‘new’ ones as the services large numbers of subscribers use them to access, catch up on a continual basis. To handle hundreds of subscribers streaming video takes powerful servers.

There are other threads on here mentioning which VPN’s people are finding working at the time (and to accesss what, is key) but that information can become out of date very quickly.

Either select other servers and protocols manually if the VPN lets you, or log out and reconnect in case it will connect you automatically to a different server. Or try another VPN if for now (and this may change back again if the VPN opens new servers targets like iPlayer won’t learn to recognise for a while).

PureVPN has been recommended in a few places I’ve seen recently, Express VPN/VPNExpress generally comes near the top, NordVPN near the top. But it depends as I’ve had particularly bad experiences with NordVPN.

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I’ll bet the BBC is very grateful for that page of IP addresses :smiley:

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It’s probably automated to spot single IP addresses from which multiple connections originate in a short space of time (and are not known to belong to ISP’s that do carrier grade NAT).

Server IDs not IP addresses. The IP addresses could be changed

I very much doubt the BBC look at domain names (which is what I presume you mean by “Server ID”)

Up until a couple of months ago I was using purevpn and it was absolutely dreadful, to the point of being unusable. I stopped that service and started to use expressvpn and it is absolutely marvellous - very very simple to set up on my router and so far has always delivered excellently across all forms of viewing, from netflix, prime through to the whole range of UK channels. Why I didn’t change earlier I will never know, but delighted with the performance.

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No, I mean NordVPN Server IDs as in Switzerland #377, France #769

I tried express VPN on my phone’s, pc and router, works on the pc with sky go, eurosport and virgin go, does not work on my android phones or the router with the same apps.

I would think the BEEB would care even less then.

They will see accesses from IP addresses, they might care to see what the domain name associated with the IP address is and block it if it has “vpn” in the name but that’s so trivial to avoid I doubt it figures.

VPN services might be able to move their IPV4 addresses around a bit but not all that easily as they have “run out” so no large new allocations are possible.

It would probably be possible to dedicate an individual to keeping an eye on VPN services and their IP addresses but it would be a bit of a thankless task. Much better to automate the process - in which case my first stab at how to do that would be as above. Possibly, since VPNs seem to work for a while that the process is semi-automated.

IPV6 addresses would be much harder as potentially every VPN client could have their own - but I’m not sure the BBC has entered the IPV6 world yet, certainly I only get IPV6 addresses for their name servers but none of the main BBC server addresses.

I do not use a VPN, but I do use Streamlocator, no probs encountered in over a year, so far.

Yes, you need to build your own vpn on aws for it to work reliably

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Vitesse Getting back to the Fire TV Stick, there was a significant software update at the beginning of the year. I don’t know if that has had any impact on your VPN software? As a matter of routine I clear out the VPN software cache, etc and reboot the Fire TV Stick when I change VPNs.

I’m also using a wired ethernet connector rather than wi-fi

I run my own through my UK VDSL connection - which is why I upgraded to fibre recently (although at the moment the VDSL is running in parallel).

I can get by with 50Mbps down, although large game updates on my son’s PC or Xbox did rather tend to hog the bandwidth for hours on end, but 10Mbps upstream here became 10Mbps downstream in France which is a bit limiting.

I now have 550/550 down/up which is rather nice.

Are there other Amazon apps for the FireStick that allow free streaming of UK or other interesting TV channels? Not like Kodi, but actual appstore apps?
BBC iPlayer has an FireStick app obviously and I have installed that, but are there others? For instance Australian TV channels or maybe even French channels? Or is the BBC an anomaly because its publicly funded?
Sky TV has an app in the US appstore and if run through a VPN it adds UK commercials, otherwise they are blocked. But its mainly news.

There are apps such as ITV Hub, All4, My5 for the main UK channels. The FireStick just runs a version of Android so should be able to run any of interest you find by searching. However, not all are in the Amazon Store. If they aren’t, you can download them to your Android phone and then use an app such as Apps2Fire to install the app on the Firestick.

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Hi Vitesse
If you have a property in the UK which has an internet connection, the easiest will be to run your own VPN. You need a raspberry pi 4 in the UK and a travel router in France and then all your problems will be solved. I have explained it in this link, but if you need more info, I can help.