Once a streaming provider blocks an IP address or block of IP addresses how do the VPN companies get around this? If they have some IP addresses in reserve surely they’ll run out in no time. Didn’t we run out of IPv4 addresses?
The VPN that I use has told me that they identify streaming providers’ ips that you connect to and route that traffic through residential ips they own rather than the data center ones and that’s how they get around blocks.
I believe generally by routing trafgic through proxies that have IP’s not blacklisted.
Use to work for a VPN provider. We had servers in locations that we got fat connections from the main ISPs from and they allowed use to lease large blocks of IPs from them. We then did some DNS magic to route streaming and other services over those IPs rather than our DC IPs. Most if not all WAFs will avoid blocking an IP owned by the large ISPs, so for the right amount of money there’s a solution.
It depends largely on the VPN provider and the technology they employ to prevent this sort of thing.
Try avoiding the big VPN providers and use smaller/new VPNs and this generally isn’t an issue.
Would you mind adding which VPN that is? Because that’s an excellent feature.
if only there was some way to tell which VPN providers without letting the streaming providers know which ISPs to lean on. 
I was interested in the how including the technology.
I would do some more research into IP address leasing before posting this comment
You should really do some research then. There most certainly is a “residential IP”. There’s nothing about it different, other than it’s classification from the Database providers that companies use to look up addresses with. You’re correct in that an IP is an IP, until it gets to the meta data, that’s where they differ.