Frustratingly, Rakuten TV is only readily available in European countries, in fact it’s only available in 43 European countries.
I’ve been travelling abroad and have tried to access Rakuten TV with a VPN and it’s not working. Even though I’m connected to a server in a country where Rakuten TV is available, I keep receiving a window saying “Rakuten TV is not available in your country.”
The good news is I managed to fix it, and I can access my Rakuten TV account from Australia and New Zealand. Here’s how I did it.
How I fixed Rakuten TV not working with VPN
These are the steps I went through to fix Rakuten TV not working with VPN. At the time I was using StrongVPN and it wasn’t working.
- Test my VPN on another device
The first thing I did was try Rakuten TV with my VPN on another device. This allowed me to diagnose whether it was my VPN having issues or my device. After not being able to access Rakuten TV on my laptop, I downloaded my VPN on my phone and tried there. Unfortunately, it still wasn’t working, which told me that it was my VPN that was having issues. - Checked for updates
When I found out my VPN was causing issues, I made sure I had the latest version of the software. That way, I could guarantee I had any fixes that my VPN may have released. To ease my mind, I reinstalled the VPN fully which resolved the issue for a short time, but after a couple of days I started running into the same issues. - Change server
This one was easy, but it took a bit of time. All I did was change server and I was able to access Rakuten TV again. After reinstalling my VPN I tried loads of different servers until it worked.
If these steps didn’t fix Rakuten TV not working with VPN for you, then I recommend subscribing to a different VPN or better yet, subscribing to two VPNs so you have double the amount of IP addresses to use.
After running into issues with StrongVPN, I subscribed to ExpressVPN and I haven’t used StrongVPN again. In fact I cancelled my StrongVPN subscription.
From my experience, not once I have had a problem watching Rakuten TV outside of Europe when using ExpressVPN. If you’re interested in subscribing, we can offer a discount here. Also, if you don’t like the look of ExpressVPN, I can recommend NordVPN, which we also have a discount for.
