You’ll Soon Be Able to Use a VPN on Your Apple TV

Although FaceTime support is probably the most significant thing coming to Apple TV with tvOS 17, it seems that Apple has another new upcoming feature that fans of geographic content shifting will likely be thrilled with.

Tucked away at the bottom of Apple’s list of new tvOS 17 features is a note that tvOS will bring “third-party VPN support.” This feature is ostensibly aimed at “enterprise and education users wanting to access content on their private networks,” but there’s no reason to believe Apple will restrict it to those specific use cases.

Related: 7 Excellent VPNs That Allow Your Apple Device to Access Any Content Anywhere

Third-party VPN support, which enables developers to create VPN apps for Apple TV. This can benefit enterprise and education users wanting to access content on their private networks, allowing Apple TV to be a great office and conference room solution in even more places.

One of the most significant limitations for folks who like to use a VPN, or virtual private network, to overcome geographic content restrictions is that most smart TVs and set-top boxes don’t provide the ability to set up a VPN. This forces the use of more complicated workarounds, like pseudo-VPNs that use technologies like proxy servers and Smart DNS. These can get the job done, but they don’t provide the same level of privacy or reliability as a full VPN, which masks your IP address and tunnels and encrypts all your traffic through an alternate exit point in the target country.

More tech-savvy users can also set up VPNs on their home routers, sending all outbound traffic from the Apple TV through a VPN. This is highly effective but more complicated to set up.

Presumably, the new VPN support in tvOS will work like it already does for the iPhone and iPad. Developers will be able to create apps and publish them on the App Store to automatically set up a VPN connection from the Apple TV, routing all outbound traffic through the VPN tunnel.

There’s already a long list of VPN apps and services for iPhone users, so it’s likely most of these will expand support to the Apple TV. Don’t expect those to arrive until tvOS 17 is publicly released this fall, though; this new capability requires APIs specific to tvOS 17, and Apple doesn’t even allow developers to submit apps that use beta OS APIs until the final release candidates (RCs) are ready. This will likely be in late August or early September.

While it’s not entirely clear yet, it seems likely Apple will also open up generic VPN support on the Apple TV through configuration profiles, as it currently does for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, since that would better align with Apple’s goal of making the Apple TV more useful in enterprise environments. Many corporate networks don’t use VPN apps, per se, but have their own unique configurations tied to their network hardware.

Either way, the ability to set up a VPN directly on the Apple TV would be a massive boon to those who want to watch their favorite shows from other regions without the need to jump through more complicated hoops. Further, because this would be deployed in the form of tvOS apps, there’s little doubt that we’ll see more than a few apps show up on the Apple TV App Store expressly for this purpose.

Related: 7 Excellent VPNs That Allow Your Apple Device to Access Any Content Anywhere