Aussie VPN expecting surge of customers for upcoming EPL season

THERE are thousands of angry English Premier League looking for alternatives to signing up to Optus. A small Aussie business could have the answer.

Vanished VPN are targeting football fans upset with Optus’ English Premier League packages.

A SMALL homegrown VPN service is taking on the might of Optus, and believes the telco’s move to secure the rights of the English Premier League will drive customers to its service.

Phil is the founder of VanishedVPN and as a British expat, he originally set up the service as a way for people to access content services such as BBC iplayer. But after reading an article last year about Optus outbidding Foxtel for the rights to the hugely popular English football competition, he and his team knew there would be a big opportunity.

A lot of fans were unhappy when Optus announced consumers would have to sign up to an Optus account in order to get access to the competition, the cheapest option currently coming in at $30 a month.

“Optus’ (EPL) offering is pretty good but it’s expensive,” Phil said.

So he and his team of “network architects and hackers” began consulting with frustrated fans on British expat forums and began devising a way to get online access to all the games and related content.

“We’re not deliberately going after Optus’ customers, what we’re doing is giving a second option to people who aren’t on Optus and don’t want to be on Optus,” he told news.com.au.

The service they settled on was Star Sports via India.

Unlike other VPN services, VanishedVPN provides a single connection for customers to an array of sporting and entertainment offerings. The service makes it easier for subscribers by actively targeting and unblocking popular sports sites and amalgamating them into a single platform instead of leaving it up to customers to find the relevant streams.

“The idea behind this is that our customers don’t care about VPNs or DNSs, it’s just a means to get the content,” Phil said.

“There’s some very complicated plumbing behind the scenes, as you can imagine.”

The Star Sports service is based on an advertisement model and therefore free, so customers can sign up to VanishedVPN for as little as $2.99 a month for a 12-month commitment, or $7.99 month-to-month, to gain access to the EPL season and more.

Vanished VPN offers a number of sporting streams in the one place.

IS IT LEGAL?

Despite the somewhat tenuous legal area such services operate in, the company is confident in its position.

In a recent blog post Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull pointed out that “the Copyright Act does not make it illegal to use a VPN to access overseas content.”

In April the government’s Productivity Commission called for the government to enshrine the legality of circumventing online geoblocking.

“The government does have a role here to clarify within the legislation that Australians should legitimately be able to circumvent geoblocking and it’s not illegal down under,” commissioner Karen Chester said.

The operators of VanishedVPN have been buoyed by such sentiments.

“We’ve taken some legal advice and if you look at Malcolm Turnbull’s blogs around the copyright laws in Australia he’s actually specifically said on there that it is legal to unblock copyrights material abroad,” Phil said. “And that’s why we’re quite comfortable with our position with things like Netflix.

“Nothing’s gone through the High Court yet, we’re a very small company let’s see how it pans out,” he added.

Given that those accessing services such as Star Sports contribute to the site’s traffic and advertising revenue, the company does not expect any difficulties stemming from that side of things.

BIGGER THAN NETFLIX

VanishedVPN has been one of the few VPN services that has managed to largely keep ahead of a sweeping crackdown by Netflix on anti geo-blocking services.

According to the company a huge majority of its customers want access to the US Netflix library but it's a constant battle to keep switching servers. Comparatively, VanishedVPN believes the sporting service is a better proposition and easier to maintain.

“Keeping the Netflix thing going has been hard but we’re one step ahead of them,” Phil said. “We don’t really wanna be in that game, we’d rather be in the sports game.”

He believes the traffic from the upcoming EPL season could even eclipse that of the Netflix demand.

“In terms of the demand when this gets out, we’re pretty confident that it’s going to pick up. I’m not sure how it’s going to compare with Netflix but personally I think it’s going to be bigger,” he said.

In addition to the EPL, subscribers can get “free” access to the Rio Olympics, F1, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga and the NFL as well as access to premium services such as Sling TV in the US which charges $US20 a month for a wide range of sports and entertainment content.

The new EPL season kicks off on August 13.