FAQs

How Does ITVX Block VPN Traffic?

ITVX restricts VPN traffic in order to honour the licensing terms it has with rights holders, and to protect ITV’s content sales in international markets.

To enforce this, the platform monitors which IP addresses are accessing its content. When the same address is used by a large number of viewers at once, that’s a clear VPN signal and the IP gets blacklisted.

It also looks at whether an IP belongs to a residential ISP or to a data centre — VPN providers mostly draw their addresses from data centres, which makes them stand out.

On top of that, ITVX cross-checks incoming IPs against a database of known VPN ranges and automatically blocks anything that matches.

To stay ahead, the VPNs we recommend in this guide refresh their UK IPs constantly and disguise their traffic so it looks like ordinary browsing.

Yes, using a VPN to access ITVX is legal. It does, however, breach ITVX’s terms of service, which prohibit the use of VPNs or proxies to disguise your location.

The realistic worst case is that your account gets terminated. In all our years covering this topic, though, we’ve never seen evidence of accounts being closed for VPN use specifically.

Can I Watch ITVX without a VPN?

If you’re abroad and want to catch up on ITVX, there are two safe alternatives to a VPN: a Smart DNS service or NordVPN’s Meshnet.

Smart DNS services, like Control D (from Windscribe), work by changing your device’s DNS settings so geo-locked content thinks you’re in the UK.

The trade-off with Smart DNS is no encryption — it’s less private than a VPN, despite costing about the same.

NordVPN’s Meshnet takes a different angle. It links your current device to one you trust on a UK connection and pushes your traffic through that machine, so you appear to be browsing from its location.

For example, if you have a desktop sitting at home in the UK, you can connect to it from abroad through Meshnet and pick up its IP.

Meshnet has to be installed and switched on at both ends for the link to work.