A cousin of mine played soccer overseas in the Finnish leagues for a bit of time and fortunately the games at the top 3 levels were all streamed by various services over there. I had his login and one subscription to Surfshark VPN later, I had a way to region shift and follow my relative’s athletic escapades as long as the time difference wasn’t a bother. It ended up not being the wake-up times that made me itchy, but the screen size.
Everything worked fine on my laptop or iPad mini, but I had my 65″ OLED right there and could not get the games going despite all of the assurances that I could by just adding a few DNS entries on my Apple TV. Airplay wasn’t an option as when the VPN was turned on on my devices, it couldn’t route the video to local endpoints. Digging through the options, though, there were OpenVPN settings I could use and if I installed a few packages on my router I could use it as an OVPN client and region shift my entire household to be in the Nordics.
While I proved the concept on the command line, this was not going to be a solution when my alarm would have to go off at ungodly hours right before kickoff. The package manager also included a MQTT client so I installed that, wired in the command line OVPN on/off, and created a switch in Home Assistant (and thus Apple Home). After that, I could just click a button or yell “Hey Siri…” and I could shift my home overseas or back to California.
The apps all worked like I was in Helsinki and I could DiCaprio GIF at my TV when my guy was on camera instead of trying to figure it out hunched over a laptop or iPad.
I no longer have the VPN service and my cousin now plies his trade coaching the next footy generation stateside, but this is one of those projects that I look back fondly on for a lot of reasons. I was even so proud of it at the time I did a write-up on Reddit.