I’m in the UK and got a VPN to watch a specific French live channel that can only be accessed from one specific website from France. It worked on Saturday and on Sunday fine all day on both my Windows laptop and my Android phone but since this morning when I go on the website while connected to a French server I get an error message in French which translates to ‘This video cannot be viewed from your location’. Other French sites with live channels only accessible from France still work so it’s only this specific site that seems to be causing issues.
I spoke with my VPN provider’s support this morning and they got me through several things to try to solve this but nothing worked: Tried on incognito mode and a different browser and tried changing DNS server addresses and connecting to a specific list of French servers they sent me.
Support also made me do a DNS leak test (connection was found to be secure and have no issues). They asked me to turned Threat Protection off but it already was off as well as turn off location in Windows but that was already off too. I also tried connecting via the VPN extensions rather than the full app on both Chrome and Firefox and still the same error message on the site.
In the end they couldn’t do anything for me and said they would pass this along to their technical team but couldn’t give me any ETA on that. Has anyone experienced anything similar and would be able to help? Thanks.
EDIT: Here’s the site in question if it’s allowed https://www.tf1.fr/ (account needed to view videos).
You r browser can also give away your location. Here is an article about it.
https://vpnoverview.com/privacy/anonymous-browsing/browser-location/
Check your timezone settings, that’s another way they can detect your location.
Also, clear your cookies, cache, and local storage
Thanks for the info. I’ll take a look at the link. The VPN worked fine on the site I want yesterday and the day before though and is still working fine on other sites so it’s very weird how it’s saying that now.
Where do I find the timezone settings on Windows please? EDIT: I found how to change the timezone settings and that didn’t work. Neither did clearing cache, cookies and storage.
Not sure what to check when on there. It does detect my IP as being in France. Is there something else I’m supposed to check?
If any of the tests, including some of those that need to be manually started, detect you as being outside of France, then that’s a method a service could use to detect your real location
I’ve already done that when speaking with support as I said in my original post. Didn’t work sadly.
Thanks. So I tried on my phone in both Firefox and Chrome and all the addresses were in France except the browser location which placed me where I actually live. I then tried a GPS spoofer app suggested in a link that another commenter shared and then when I redid the tests all of them placed me in France. I then tried the site I want on both browsers and still no luck. The thing is though that either way the site let’s me watch replays as if I were in France. It’s only the live feeds that for some reason place me outside of France. I just don’t get it. In any case I’ll try to see if I can fool my browsers’ location on my computer tomorrow morning but I don’t have much hope.
That’s strange. Did you delete all cache, cookies, etc before trying it this time? Not sure how it’s done on mobile, but on desktop Firefox, it’s ctrl+shift+delete, then you check all boxes and make sure the time range is set to “everything.” It’s the same procedure for mobile Firefox, but I forgot how to get to it, and I remember it being slightly hidden.
Sadly nothing worked on desktop either… I even tried on new devices that had never used the VPN or the site yet to see and it’s the same issue with the replays playing but not the love feeds…
Is it possible that your real location is tied to say, a billing address in the payment information of your account?
No chance of that as you can only use a French card and my mother let me use hers since she lives in France so it has a French billing address.
Check https://browserleaks.com/javascript with your VPN connected. What does it report for the following fields?
- System Time
- toLocaleString
- toLocaleFormat
- DateTimeFormat
- locale
- timeZone
- language
- languages
Even with a French IP address, websites can detect if you aren’t actually in France based on your system locale (language, region, time zone, and keyboard). Have you tried changing those?
Windows:
- Settings / Time & Language / Date & time / Time zone
- Settings / Time & Language / Language / Preferred languages
- Settings / Time & Language / Region / Country or region
- Settings / Time & Language / Region / Regional format
Firefox:
- Settings / General / Language / Choose your preferred language for displaying pages / Choose…
Chrome:
- Settings / Language / Preferred language
Thanks for the link and walkthrough. First time I used the link it showed all UK/London/English. I then followed your instructions and it changed to France/Paris/French. Unfortunately that still didn’t solve the issue and I still can’t view the live feeds.
Could be that the website is blocking VPN traffic then. Many VPN IP addresses are readily identifiable as such, because the majority of VPN providers use commercial data center (e.g. M247, DataCamp, LeaseWeb) IP ranges rather than residential. And most major streaming sites (e.g. Netflix, Prime, Disney) keep a database of those IPs and block them.
In that case, the only option would be to look into a VPN provider that offers a residential IP address in France. But even that is not a guarantee; if a lot of users are using those IPs, they could get blacklisted by streaming sites as well.