VPN or Proxy

On holiday in France the other week I wanted to watch football on Sky on my laptop, but was unable to as I found that if you are out of the country, you are denied access. I'm told that many people get round it with a proxy or VPN. Thing is, which is better? Do you pay for access to either of them or are there good free ones? Is it hard to set up and do either of them slow down your access to the net?
Any advice from experienced user would be appreciated.

VPN is probably easier for the average user.

Have a look at http://hidemyass.com/

Not sure how the one you suggest works but is that going to allow you to pretend to be in the UK when you are not? Most of the use for proxy/VPN is to hide who you are whereas with Sky content rather than hiding you want to pretend you are in the UK. So, would need a UK based VPN/Proxy to be able to watch the Sky programmes when outside the UK.

I am assuming that these would be covered by UK laws and therefore should only be used for legal UK activities (which watching a stream that is DRM protected outside of the country for which the protection is based would be against Sky Ts&Cs and therefore potentially open to civil prosecution - and as the VPN/Proxy would be covered by UK law they would probably be legally obliged to provide your details to Sky if they were to decide to prosecute).

See http://hidemyass.com/vpn/servers/

OK. Now, if I was Sky my assumption would be that people using these services were probably doing so to get around my Ts&Cs and therefore I would not place those IPs into the allowed address blocks for UK traffic.

Sky may not be doing this at present but they could at any time. They are trying to protect their rights to the media and therefore would want to stop these sorts of "back doors" into the network.

No personal experience of this myself but I would be surprised if Sky were not trying to stop these sort of loopholes - but then for years you've been able to buy a Sky box and plug it in over in Europe to be able to get Sky TV outside of the "allowed" coverage area). Maybe I'm just being paranoid but I can't believe Sky wouldn't try to stop these work arounds.

I get round it by using a slingbox.

That allows me to watch my Sky box across my home network and the internet. It has worked very well in Ireland, the UK and India.

They have 28000 IP addresses for a reason.

The Sky service is relatively locked down. The online account is tied to a paid service and they limit the amount of devices that are able to access the content simultaneously.

28,000 across 42 countries - many of which are likely to be in the states. The only ones Sky would need to actively not include on the list are the ones pretending to be UK ones which is presumably a much lower number than 28,000. And presumably the RIPE details will show who has the addresses to ignore.

3.5K in the UK. Anyway, as I've already pointed out, the Sky system is sufficiently locked down. I've tested HMA with iPlayer, Sky Go, 4oD, Five on demand and ITV Player. The best thing to if one has plenty of bandwidth is to run an SSH daemon at home.