No, You Cannot Use a VPN to Free Quibi
What a strange headline to write, but it’s true. The minute I heard that Quibi was launching a free ad service in Australia, my first thought was, “I wonder if a VPN will allow me to access all the most dangerous game I want without having to pay a subscription fee. dying service. “
And while you can use a VPN to do all sorts of nefarious tasks – from BitTorrent to watching Netflix and browsing websites blocked in your country – you won’t be able to use this simple solution to get yourself some free Quibi. Alas, while Quibi’s business model may not be the best, and it seems like the company has raised billions of dollars with nothing good to do, it is at least smart enough to go beyond this obvious hack.
This is because Quibi’s offer requires you to download the app from the app store in countries where Quibi allows ad-supported free streaming: Australia and New Zealand. You can change your IP address to Australian VPN as much as you like, but you will still download the Quibi app from the app store associated with your country – in my case, the United States. And when you do, you won’t see an option to subscribe to Quibi for free.
Of course, you are probably thinking the same thing as I did when I found out about this: “Oh, I can just change the region of my App Store to a different country.” You can, of course, but it’s a mess. On Android , for example, you can do this switch once a year and you will be subject to some potentially annoying restrictions on the Google Play store :
- “You can only change your country on Google Play once a year. Therefore, if you change your country, you will not be able to change it for 1 year.
- When you change the country, you will not be able to use the Google Play balance that you have in the old country in the new country.
- You may lose access to some books, movies, TV shows, games and applications. “
On iOS, you’ll have a few more hurdles :
- “Spend the rest of your store credit on your Apple ID. Find out what to do if your store account balance is less than the cost of a single item.
- Cancel any subscriptions, including Apple Music, and wait until the end of the subscription period.
- Wait for all subscriptions, pre-orders, movie rentals, or season passes to complete, and wait for all pending store refunds to be processed.
- Make sure you have a payment method for the new country or region. “
While there are other creative tricks you can use on iOS to temporarily switch between app stores from different regions, and I’ve covered these hacking tricks briefly, I think they end up causing more problems than they are worth, especially for free Quibi. I counted them; I did! But having to remember multiple accounts and toggle between App Store logins every time I want to stream a show (with ads in it, no less) just didn’t seem like the best use of my time.
With that said, given how Quibi has been doing lately , I fully expect the service to launch an ad-supported streaming layer in the United States at some point. And shouldn’t they have done it in the first place? It would be much easier to get people interested in your service if it were free. Then you can encourage them to pay to get rid of the irritation due to the content, which they are beginning to get stuck, and eventually remove the level of free use as soon as you appear more attractive to a la Netflix mass market, that Kibi unfortunately , not destined to be.