Streaming in the US has become a broken and fiendishly complex tangle of ephemeral choices—and that’s before you factor in sports. You can see why it might seem somehow easier to stream shows from other countries, where the networks, some of them with public dollars behind them, offer broader access, if you seem to be located there.
So it is that privacy-focused Swiss firm Proton has released a Proton VPN app for Apple TV. The firm notes that it “offers over 6,200 servers across 100 countries” and its own guides to accessing various regional content providers, such as Britain’s BBC and France.tv, or sports and live event channels, “no matter where you are.”
That this—virtual geolocation—is mentioned ahead of “privacy and security benefits” is notable, but only if you haven’t looked. I typed “VPN” into an Apple TV’s App Store search interface today and learned that Proton was now one among dozens and dozens of VPN offerings for Apple TV. “Dozens” is as far as I can go, because I eventually got tired of clicking to keep scrolling down.
