[mbreese]

Some streaming devices. My IP TV service doesn't work through a VPN back to my home. It acquires location information from GPS (or other location sources), not the IP address. I had wanted to watch something from my home town broadcast channel while visiting family in another state. Turns out that wasn't possible.

[milankragujevic]

Wait, someone bothered to put GPS checking? Awful, that's absolutely not required to license a channel, AFAIK only regular IP-based checks are enforced by channel networks to the distributing ISPs.

Was this on a smart phone / tablet or TV/STB? I used a similar thing to let my parents watch TV from my account -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22052333

I'm not sure why an ISP would limit the physical location, and also how would that work if they have users in another state?

I've heard about WISPs putting GPS locks on their CPE devices, but that's pretty useless too, they're setup to connect to one tower only, if you move it, it won't see the tower and won't connect to anything, so ... ??

[mbreese]

This was using my phone and (I think) my laptop.

The specific about it are that I was trying to watch content on a broadcast channel. It was probably a local sports game. But, I was in a different city with a different affiliate. So, the geographic region does actually play into the licensing for these channels. I could otherwise watch whatever (and the local affiliate for the city I was in), but regardless of what my IP address was, I couldn’t watch the affiliate for my city.

It makes sense, but I’m not sure I was expecting the TV provider to be that detailed.

[jdsnape]

In the U.K. this is done by BT for users of their sport app, so the channels can only be streamed in the U.K. I think this was a requirement of the rights holder (the sports bodies).

[milankragujevic]

Yes, sports are a different thing altogether, the rights holders have draconian rules because piracy is so widespread.

Ironically, a TV show that my ISP's content division made, which is free for it's users, was the most downloaded torrent (in Serbia) in the second half of 2019. I did an analysis of the IPs of everyone who downloaded it, a significant percentage (~20%) were from that ISP.

Basically, people risk fines and warning letters by pirating a TV show that is free for them (cable ISP that doesn't sell Internet without TV, any and all TV packages come with a smart phone app and website where you can watch your channels + a free VOD catalog) because the restrictions on device type, bootloader integrity, IP address are so draconian.

The ISP, of course, looses in the end, because it's users were also uploading the TV show to other torrent clients of non-users, which is lost potential revenue.

[rohan1024]

If it is android then in developer options there's option to spoof location system wide without root user.

[adrianN]

How does the TV get a GPS signal indoors?