Is there services they are using to detect known IP addresses of VPN services or something more sophisticated?
DisneyPlus, more so than others, routinely doesn’t even render parts of itself if my VPN is connected (screen elements like text boxes, not just the video stream). I just went to resub so my niece could watch cartoons when she visits today and the login/resub page literally doesn’t render half of itself when my VPN is connected. More of a curiosity than anything else. Figured someone might know. Cheers!
Yes, it keeps a blacklist of IPs known to be VPNs. If you find a small or new enough VPN service you may be able to visit the page until Disney figures out that it’s a VPN.
I don’t have a DisneyPlus account, but speaking generally yes there are many services dedicated to preventing VPNs. Most streaming platforms have something in place to prevent people from accessing content not available in their country, etc.
The weird rendering you’re describing is likely caused from only parts of their site being sensitive to your VPN/IP. AKA example.com might load fine, but fonts and css from assets.example.com are blocked due to the VPN.
They block the asn of all datacenters(AWS,azure,ovh,hetzner, digitalocean etc) that don’t provide residential internet services. This means that even new vpn services will be blocked because most, if not all, VPN providers just rent servers from hosting companies. You can bypass it by using residential proxies/VPN but those are generally more expensive.