Let’s start with what a VPN is by looking at how things work when you don’t have one.
When a computer connects to a network or the internet, it is identified by an IP address. For an internet connection, this might be the address your ISP/phone company assigned to computer/phone. If you’re using a home or business connection, it’s usually the address assigned to your router. That’s a public IP address. If you have a home or business network, the devices connected to the network get an IP address that’s private to the network. The router does something called network address translation to convert that private IP address to a public one when you request something from the internet.
Without a VPN, when you connect to a server to access, download or stream something, you typically provide a URL like reddit.com/r/thisgroup. Everything before the / is the domain name. Your computer or phone looks up an IP address for this domain name using DNS (domain name service). Your computer then sends off a request to the server. The server you’re connecting to sees your public IP and what you asked for. They need this so they know where their response needs to go. They typically log this and keep the information for some period of time. That’s mostly so they can diagnose problems but sometimes they are compelled to keep this information and hand it over to authorities when requested. Similarly, your ISP will have a record of what customers have been assigned what public IP addresses.
When you connect to another server over the internet, you’re usually not connecting directly to that server. Your request bounces from router to router and computer to computer several times before it hits its destination. Each of these routers and computers will see the IP address of the server you’re connecting to, as well as what you’re requesting from them. That’s a big problem if you’re doing anything like banking, shopping or anything where you don’t want exactly what you and the server are saying to each other. It’s partially solved by a technology called TLS (used to be called SSL). This is a topic all of its own but the outcome is that the server has proved that they are who they say they are, and everything you say to each other from that point is encrypted. The computers between you and the server will see that you’re talking to each other but won’t be able to understand what you’re saying. Whenever you connect to a service with an address that starts with https://, this is what’s happening. Whenever you connect with http://, everything the server and you say to each other, and your IP addresses are out in the open and can be read by any computer that sits between you.
A VPN takes this a step further. Similarly to how your router translates your private IP address into the public one assigned by your ISP, a VPN provider routes your requests to one of their servers. takes your ISP-supplied public IP address and translates it into one they supply before sending the request on to the server you want to talk to. That way, the end server you’re talking to sees the VPN provider-assigned address instead of your user-supplied one.
This can make it harder to identify you or to block traffic to servers like IPTV providers but you are placing a lot of trust in the VPN provider to keep your identity, including your ISP-assigned IP address safe. Ideally they don’t log any information about the requests you make but you kind of need to take their word for it.
There have been numerous cases of VPN providers keeping customer data and handing it over to 3rd parties and there has been a lot of consolidation where a handful of companies now own most of the more popular services.
Now is any of this helpful or necessary for IPTV users? It depends. A VPN can help in cases like:
- your ISP or another party has taken steps to block IPTV traffic. A VPN makes it harder to identify this traffic to block it.
- you live in a place where you can get in trouble for using IPTV. A VPN makes it harder to identify you.
- your IPTV provider only allows connections from a different part of the world than where you are.
- most IPTV providers don’t support HTTPS. Without a VPN, any computer that the traffic between you and the IPTV provider bounces through can be read. This includes your username and password as well as exactly which streams you’re watching.
For me, that last benefit is worth using a VPN for.