How to watch NBC from anywhere7 of 7 providers have servers in the United States

NBC's streaming carries its network output and, in Olympic years, the US rights to the Games. Opening it from outside the United States returns a region error rather than a player, and no account setting fixes it. The mechanism is simple: the service reads the country attached to your IP address and refuses anything that is not the United States.

A VPN replaces that address with one belonging to a server in the United States, so the check passes. Which means the only question that matters when choosing a provider is whether it has servers in the United States at all — and, if the first address is blocked, whether it has a second city there to move to.

Locations each provider publishes in its own server list, recounted daily by VPN LIFE. A published location is not a promise that a given server is reachable from where you are right now.

Why NBC is not available outside the United States

US network licences and, for major events, exclusive US rights.

Two consequences follow from that, and both are worth knowing before you start. The first is that the service has an incentive to detect and block VPN addresses, so a server that worked last month can stop working. The second is that using one to change your apparent region is prohibited by most services' terms of use — the consequence is an account measure rather than a legal one, but it is real, and articles that tell you it is "perfectly fine" are skipping half the picture.

Best VPNs for watching NBC from abroad

We rank on what we can check. Each of the five below publishes a location in the United States; the tables are our own counts and the providers' own published terms, not a summary of their marketing.

ExpressVPN: the widest spread of cities

ExpressVPN publishes more multi-city countries than anyone else in our set — 11 countries where you can pick between two or more locations, including 56 in the United States, 7 in the United Kingdom, 6 in Australia and 4 in Japan. If your problem is a blocked address rather than a missing country, that spread is the thing that gets you out of it. It is the most expensive option here, and it is the one we would pick for streaming.

ExpressVPN in use

NordVPN: the largest country list, and the one we measured

NordVPN covers more countries than anything else we track. It is also one of the two services we measured ourselves, so the retention figures above are its actual numbers rather than a claim. It operates from Panama, has been audited by Deloitte, allows 10 simultaneous connections, and lists obfuscated servers and a kill switch among its features — the two things that matter where VPN traffic is filtered.

NordVPN in use

Surfshark: unlimited devices, and level with NordVPN in half our tests

Surfshark is the other service in our own measurements. In London and New York it was level with NordVPN; in Tokyo and Los Angeles it trailed by 11% and 17%. It places no limit on simultaneous connections, which makes it the sensible choice for a household rather than a person. Audited by Deloitte, operating from the Netherlands, with Camouflage Mode for networks that filter VPN traffic.

Surfshark in use

CyberGhost: the longest money-back window, with a catch

CyberGhost's 45-day money-back guarantee is the longest here, and it is the reason it appears on most lists. Read the condition: 45 days applies to the six-month and two-year plans, and the monthly plan gets 14 days. It publishes 10 multi-city countries, with 11 locations in the United States, but only a single city in Japan — so it is a weaker choice if Japanese services are your target.

CyberGhost in use

Private Internet Access: unlimited connections, US jurisdiction

PIA places no limit on devices and publishes an Advanced Kill Switch, obfuscation, multi-hop and port forwarding. Its no-logs claim has been audited by Deloitte Audit Romania. The trade-off is jurisdiction: it operates from the United States, which some readers will rule out on principle. We list it because the rest of the record is strong and because it is one of only four providers with two or more cities in Japan.

Private Internet Access in use

How to watch NBC from anywhere

• Pick a provider that publishes a location in the United States
• Install the app on the device you will actually watch on
• Clear the site's stored data before you open it
• If it still refuses, change city before you change anything else

Step 1: choose a provider with servers in the United States

Check the count first, not the price. A provider without a location in the United States cannot help with NBC at any price, and a provider with exactly one location there leaves you no fallback when that address is recognised. The table above is our daily count.

Step 2: install the app and connect

Install the provider's app on the device you will actually watch on — the phone, the laptop, the TV box. Sign in, pick the United States from the country list, and wait for the connection to report as established. Your public address changes at that moment; nothing else about the device changes.

Step 3: clear the site's stored data, then open NBC

This is the step people skip and then report that the VPN does not work. Sites cache your previous region in cookies and local storage, and an app can hold it until it is force-closed. Clear the site data — or force-quit the app — and only then open NBC. If it still refuses, change to a different city in the United States before changing anything else.

Step 4: if it still fails, work through the causes in order

In our experience the order is: wrong country selected (more common than it sounds — apps stay connected to wherever you last used them); cached region data; a blocked address, fixed by switching city; the protocol, which some networks fingerprint; and finally the account's own region, which a VPN cannot change at all.

How much speed actually survives the tunnel

Every VPN site says a tunnel costs you speed. Almost none of them say how much. We measured it by hand rather than repeating a claim: 14 cities, 46 paired runs, comparing NordVPN and Surfshark against the same raw line in the same session. In the 11 cities where we also measured the bare line, the share that survived the tunnel ranged from 40% to 90%.

Measured by VPN LIFE. Raw-line figures are rounded to the nearest 10 Mbps. Percentages are the share of the raw line that survived.

• 14 cities, 46 paired runs, measured by hand
• 11 of those cities also have the bare line measured
• 40% to 90% of the raw line survived
• We only name a winner in 4 cities — the rest have too few runs

The spread between cities is larger than the spread between providers. In London roughly nine tenths of the line survived on both services; in Tokyo it was closer to half. That is worth knowing before you blame the provider: "this VPN is slow" is usually "this route is slow".

We only call a winner in a city when we have five or more paired runs there and the gap is at least 10%. That threshold is met in 4 of the 14 cities — Tokyo and Los Angeles, where NordVPN averaged ahead, and London and New York, where the two were level. In the remaining ten cities we publish the numbers and say the sample is too small, rather than ranking on one run.

When it still does not work

• Wrong country still selected. Apps stay connected to wherever you last used them. Check the app before you check anything else.
• Cached region. Clear site data and cookies, or force-quit the app entirely — not just switch away from it.
• Blocked address. Change to another city in the United States if your provider has one; ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Surfshark, CyberGhost, Private Internet Access, Mullvad VPN, Windscribe publish more than one.
• Protocol fingerprinting. Some networks recognise the default protocol. Switching to another one in the app's settings sometimes clears it.
• Account region. If the account itself is registered to another country, no VPN changes that — that is a billing record, not an address.

We list these in the order they actually occur. In our experience the first two account for most reports of "the VPN does not work", and the last one accounts for most of the rest.

Frequently asked questions

Is it legal to watch NBC with a VPN?

Using a VPN is legal in Japan and in most countries — it is ordinary network technology used every day for remote work. Whether it breaches NBC's own terms of use is a separate question, and usually the answer is yes. The consequence there is an account measure rather than a legal one. We keep the two apart because running them together is how most articles on this subject mislead people.

Can I use a free VPN for this?

Usually not, and the reason is measurable rather than moral. Even on paid services we measured, between 10% and 60% of the raw line disappears into the tunnel — in Tokyo a 780 Mbps line came out at roughly half. Free tiers add a data cap and a much smaller server list on top of that. They also have to earn money somewhere, and where the product is free the revenue usually comes from the traffic itself.

Will it slow my connection down?

Yes, and we have measured how much: across 14 cities and 46 paired runs, between 40% and 90% of the raw line survived the tunnel. The variation between cities is wider than the variation between providers — London kept about 90% on both services we tested, Tokyo about half. If a VPN feels slow, the route is a more likely explanation than the provider.

What is a VPN, in one paragraph?

A VPN is an encrypted connection between your device and a server run by the provider. Everything you send goes through that tunnel, so the network you are sitting on sees only an encrypted link to one address, and the sites you open see the server's address rather than yours. That is the entire mechanism; the differences between providers are about where the servers are, how fast the route is, and what the provider keeps.

What else is a VPN good for?

The everyday case is public Wi-Fi, where the network operator would otherwise see every site you connect to. The other common ones are reaching services from home while travelling — banks and government portals refuse foreign addresses constantly — and comparing prices that vary by country. We publish the underlying server and speed data for all of it on our open data page.

Conclusion

7 of the seven providers we track publish a location in the United States, and 7 of those publish more than one city there. Those two numbers, rather than a server total or a discount, are what decide whether a provider can help you here. For NBC specifically, a provider with two cities in the United States is worth more than a provider with a hundred extra countries.

Where we have measured something ourselves — the speed figures above — we say so and give the sample size. Where we have not, we say that too rather than filling the gap. The files behind every number on this page are published as open data under CC BY 4.0, and the method is on how we test.

If you find an error in the data, we would rather have the correction than the link.