I am the "Rich" that people are mentioning. I have programmed over 200 firesticks with a customer base of 293 people. The firestick is designed to enable you to watch tv with no monthly costs or subscription fees. A VPN is not needed. The device itself needs to be "fine tuned" during setup, and each app installed also needs fine tuning, to help eliminate buffering as much as possible. After that we are at the mercy of the wifi provider. On average it takes about 1 1/2 hours to properly program a firestick. You will be able to see sports, news, live tv, entertainment, movies and tv series, again all for free, no additional costs. You don't need to subscribe/pay for to see CNN, MSNBC, HBO, Cinemax, Showtime, ABC, NBC,CBS, to name a few. Netflix will still require a paid subscription but many of the things you get with Netflix you can see with just using the firestick and not going through Netflix. For more details or other questions you might want to check the various local facebook groups .