Last Updated: Aug 2, 2025 While I was impressed with Hotspot Shield’s streaming capabilities, I was disappointed with its overall lack of consistency. Its speeds varied a lot and so did the availability of servers and features across platforms. Also, I discovered a privacy scandal alleging that Hotspot Shield collects its user’s IP addresses. Although it wasn’t as bad as it sounded, it still makes me hesitant to trust the service. While Hotspot Shield often fell short of the top premium options on the market, I was impressed by how much it offers with its free plan. If you’re interested in seeing it for yourself, you can try Hotspot Shield’s unlimited free plan or try out a premium subscription for 45 days with its money-back guarantee. That way, you can test it yourself before deciding to commit. Try Hotspot Shield risk-free
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As an experienced publication in the field of VPNs, we offer specialized servers tailored for streaming and gaming purposes in the United States and the United Kingdom, catering to both Windows and iOS users. In order to evaluate their performance, I personally conducted tests on both the optimized servers and the regular servers. Hotspot Shield’s proprietary Hydra protocol (also known as Catapult Hydra) makes streaming easy because it hides the fact that you’re using a VPN. This means that websites won’t block your connection, as it looks the same as a normal connection. Unfortunately, Hotspot Shield’s free plan wasn’t able to access any streaming services due to limited server access, which has likely resulted in these servers being blacklisted by most streaming platforms. If you need a free VPN for streaming, I recommend you try Proton VPN’s streaming servers. Thankfully, the premium plans were not plagued by this issue. I was able to access my Netflix account instantly using one of Hotspot Shield’s US servers. The Irishman loaded with no problems, giving me lag-free viewing even in HD and zero buffering in 4K. Testing other locations with colleagues across the world, my team and I made use of servers in the US, UK, Canada, Germany, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, India, and Brazil and never had any issues. Hotspot Shield’s servers in the US also reliably accessed Hulu. When I tried watching Palm Springs, everything played perfectly. On some servers in the US, my video started pixelated but only took 10-12 seconds to increase to HD, and it remained stable for the rest of the show. This is on par with what I’ve experienced with the top streaming VPNs. After testing the US server and 15 other servers with colleagues abroad, Hotspot Shield was able to access Disney+ in the US, Canada, and the UK. The Mandalorian loaded in under 6 seconds, and, although pixelated at first, the quality increased to full HD in 10-20 seconds. Even using servers that are far away, you won’t miss any of baby Yoda’s adorable antics. Try Hotspot Shield risk-free
