Before
Star
From 2021 the Star tile carried Disney's general-entertainment catalogue internationally — the ABC, FX and 20th Television material that in the U.S. sits on Hulu. That is what Italian subscribers learned to look for.
First, the reassuring part. If you used to find American network shows under the Star tile in Disney+ and cannot find it any more, nothing was taken away — Disney renamed that tile Hulu on 8 October 2025. Same place in the app, same catalogue, different badge. Open Disney+ and look there before you read further.
Second, the part that rename does not solve. abc.com is blocked from Italian addresses, and ABC says so itself: “No; ABC.com is only available if you're physically located within the U.S. or its territories (including Puerto Rico, Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands).” Italian licences buy series; they do not buy ABC's website.
The free ad-supported tier on abc.com needs no account and no card — which makes ABC the one service on this site where a U.S. location is the whole fix rather than step one of also paying someone. The extra content behind a U.S. TV-provider sign-in is a separate layer, and we are explicit below that we do not supply it.
This is the most common reason Italian readers end up searching for a page like this one, and the answer is better news than they expect. Disney did not remove its international general-entertainment catalogue from Disney+. It renamed the tile. Star became Hulu on 8 October 2025, worldwide, and ABC series sit under it exactly as they did before.
What makes this so disorienting is that the failure is invisible. Nothing announces itself; you open Disney+, look for a word that is no longer there, search for it, get nothing, and reasonably conclude the content went away. It did not. Open Disney+ and look for the Hulu tile before you do anything else on this page.
From 2021 the Star tile carried Disney's general-entertainment catalogue internationally — the ABC, FX and 20th Television material that in the U.S. sits on Hulu. That is what Italian subscribers learned to look for.
From 8 October 2025 the same tile is branded Hulu, bringing the international app in line with the U.S. product name. The location in the app and the catalogue behind it did not change with the label.
Whatever the tile is called, it is a Disney+ catalogue and not ABC's website. The free ad-supported tier on abc.com, and the extra content behind a U.S. TV-provider sign-in, are U.S.-only by ABC's own rule and no Italian subscription reaches them.
Worth ordering this properly: check the Hulu tile first, then decide whether anything else on this page is worth your time. For a lot of readers it is not, and we would rather say so.
“Is ABC blocked in Italy?” has three answers depending on which part of ABC you mean, and lumping them together is how readers end up disappointed. What ABC publishes is stratified: an open layer, a pay-TV layer and a Hulu layer.
Only the first of those is a pure location question. The other two are somebody else's paid product with a location requirement attached, which is a different thing wearing the same error message.
| Layer | What you get | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| ABC.com, free tier | A rotating selection of episodes and clips, ad-supported, no account | A U.S. location — and nothing else |
| ABC.com, signed in | The additional content ABC reserves for pay-TV subscribers | A U.S. location plus a participating U.S. TV-provider account, which USip does not supply |
| Hulu | Next-day full episodes and full seasons | A U.S. location plus a paid Hulu subscription |
The middle row is where the marketing on competitor sites quietly breaks down. Signing in with a U.S. TV provider means holding an account with Comcast, Spectrum, DIRECTV, YouTube TV or one of their peers. USip sells network access; it does not open accounts with American cable companies, and no product can present you as a subscriber of a company you have never paid.
With the tile found and the layers understood, the remaining question is narrow: what is on abc.com that no Italian subscription reaches?
One whole category vanishes before the table, which simplifies everything that follows. ABC's help page states: “The ABC mobile and streaming device apps are no longer available.” No app means no App Store country to change, no Google Play region to move, nothing to sideload. The route is a browser, and that is the entire device story.
| What you want | In Italy | On abc.com from a U.S. location |
|---|---|---|
| ABC series, licensed | Disney+ Italy, under the Hulu tile — formerly Star | Not applicable — different product |
| Recent episodes on ABC's own site | Blocked by location | A rotating free selection, ad-supported, no account |
| Full past seasons | Disney+ where licensed | Hulu — a separate paid U.S. subscription |
| Content reserved for pay-TV subscribers | Not sold — no Italian provider is on ABC's list | A U.S. TV-provider sign-in, which USip does not supply |
| An ABC mobile or TV app | Does not exist | Does not exist — retired by Disney, browser only |
| Daytime, talk and specials ABC has not licensed abroad | Generally not available | Whatever ABC is currently publishing on the free tier |
Here is something most guides never mention, and it explains more Italian complaints than anything technical you could change on your laptop. The public address your connection presents to a website is very often not yours alone. Carrier-grade NAT is widespread on Italian consumer broadband — fixed-wireless and mobile-based home connections in particular — and behind it hundreds of subscribers can present the same address at the same moment.
That matters because streaming services score addresses, not just countries. If the address you are sharing has been used for something a service dislikes, you inherit the result without having done anything. It is also why the same plan, the same router and the same settings can behave differently for two people in the same city.
The corollary is the honest version of what we sell. A residential U.S. IP does not just move you to a different country — it moves you to a different kind of address. That is the part that matters, and it is worth understanding before you decide.
Common on Italian FWA and mobile-based home broadband. Many households behind one public address means the reputation attached to that address is collective. You cannot audit it and you cannot clean it.
The same mechanism at a much larger scale, and in a datacentre range that is identifiable as one. Thousands of subscribers, one address, whatever history all of them built. This is the ordinary reason a VPN that worked last month stops.
An ordinary home connection used by one household has the profile of an ordinary home connection, because that is what it is. That is an advantage rather than a guarantee: ABC can still block any address it chooses.
And while we are here: a third-party DNS resolver does not change any of this. DNS turns names into addresses. It does not change the address your request leaves from, which is the only thing the location check reads.
USip supplies a residential U.S. IP connection. That is the whole product. It presents a U.S. location to ABC, which is what ABC's first check reads, and it presents it from a residential rather than a datacentre address, which is the section above.
It is not an ABC account, because the free tier does not have accounts. It is not a U.S. TV-provider subscription. It is not Hulu. And it is not a guarantee about how ABC will treat a particular address on a particular day.
If what you want sits behind layer two or layer three, a connection from us gets you closer to it and does not get you to it. We would rather write that sentence than have you discover it after paying.
3-day free trial · 14-day money-back guarantee · TV-provider and Hulu access not included
Order matters more than any individual step. Two of these five are about making sure you are not solving a problem you do not have, which is the cheapest troubleshooting there is.
If you used to find American network shows under Star and cannot now, open Disney+ and look for the Hulu tile instead. Disney renamed it on 8 October 2025 and the catalogue moved with the badge. This costs nothing and ends the question for a large share of Italian readers.
These fail in completely different ways and no amount of reconnecting confuses them into each other. A series Disney has not licensed for Italy is a rights problem. A title on abc.com that asks you to pick a TV provider is a layer-two problem. Knowing which one you have decides whether a U.S. address helps at all.
Connect, load a public-IP checker, confirm it reports United States rather than Italy — and only then open abc.com. ABC decides on location at the edge and writes that verdict into a cookie, so a page opened a few seconds early keeps failing long after everything else is correct.
Worth stating plainly because many Italian readers already use a third-party resolver for unrelated reasons and assume it is doing more than it is. Changing DNS changes how names are turned into addresses. It does not change the address your request arrives from, which is the only thing ABC's first check reads.
One standard free-tier episode, for a full minute. Not a live feed and not something behind a provider sign-in, because those test a second thing at the same time. A private window matters here because there is no app to reset — the browser profile holds the entire state.
3-day free trial · 14-day money-back guarantee · TV-provider and Hulu access not included
Because Disney retired the ABC apps, none of the usual app-store problems apply — no App Store country to change, no Google Play region to move. What is left is bringing the residential U.S. connection up on the device you will actually watch on, then opening a browser. Each video below is the USip setup walkthrough for that platform.
Everything you need to inspect is inspectable here: the adapter, the public address a site receives, and the stored site data. Establish the connection, read a checker back in the same browser you are about to use, then type abc.com into a fresh private window — never before.
Step by step: the ABC setup page for Windows, or the general open the windows guide.
A Mac can be configured perfectly and still fail, because iCloud Private Relay takes Safari out of your connection and through Apple's network without announcing it. Disable it first. Anything you diagnose with Private Relay running is a measurement of Apple's routing, not of yours.
Step by step: the ABC setup page for macOS, or the general open the mac guide.
Elsewhere, iOS means wrestling with the account country your App Store is tied to. Not here: nothing is installed, so the phone's browser is the product. Private Relay off, connection up, private tab, abc.com. It is a shorter list than any other page on this site can offer you.
Step by step: the ABC setup page for iPhone and iPad, or the general open the ios guide.
Region has stopped mattering because there is no download. What has not stopped mattering is Android deciding your VPN client is idle and closing it — whitelist it in the battery settings. An episode that dies at the eight-minute mark is usually that, and it is indistinguishable from a block if you are not expecting it.
Step by step: the ABC setup page for Android, or the general open the android guide.
No ABC app exists for any television platform, which at least makes the advice short: send a tab from a machine that is already playing the episode. There is no store region to change here because there is no store entry to find.
A cast that fails while the laptop keeps playing is not a location failure. The stream is still being fetched by the laptop, from the same address that just worked — what broke is the handoff to the screen, and no amount of reconnecting addresses it.
3-day free trial · 14-day money-back guarantee · TV-provider and Hulu access not included
One residential U.S. IP — an ordinary consumer address on a U.S. ISP rather than a datacentre range. USip and ABC are separate services, and the plan below is the connection only. ABC.com’s free tier needs no subscription from anyone; what USip does not supply is everything above it — a participating U.S. TV-provider account, a Hulu subscription, or any right to a particular title.
1 Month Pass
€15.99
€9.99/month after a 3-day trial.
6 Months Pass
€39/semiannually after a 3-day trial.
12 Month Pass
€69/year after a 3-day free trial.
Separate services: these prices are for the USip VPN Residential U.S. IP service only. A participating U.S. TV-provider account, a Hulu subscription and content availability are not included. ABC.com’s free tier needs no subscription at all.
With no app in the picture, a single browser profile holds everything that can go wrong: the cookie carrying an old verdict, the extension quietly rewriting requests, the Apple feature routing around your connection. That concentration is convenient — there is one place to look — and it is also why a single bad cookie can survive every sensible thing you try next.
Four habits remove almost all of it.
The verdict ABC reaches about your location does not stay in memory; it is written down. Load the site once from an Italian address and that record sits in the profile, answering for you afterwards no matter what the connection does. Connect, verify, and only then type the address.
A private window has no stored record to consult, which turns a hunt through site data into a keyboard shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+N in Chrome and Edge, Ctrl+Shift+P in Firefox, Cmd+Shift+N on a Mac. Use a fresh one for each attempt while you are still establishing what works.
It is enabled for a great many iCloud subscribers who have never opened the setting, and it quietly sends Safari through Apple's own network rather than yours. The tell is Chrome succeeding where Safari fails on the same machine, at the same moment, on the same connection.
A client showing a U.S. flag is describing what it meant to do. A public-IP checker opened in the profile you are testing with is describing what a website receives. When those two disagree, the second one is right, and it disagrees more often than most people expect.
Two sentences from ABC's own support site, unedited. They are the basis for everything above, and they are short enough that there is no excuse for anyone to summarise them for you — including us.
“No; ABC.com is only available if you're physically located within the U.S. or its territories (including Puerto Rico, Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands).”
help.abc.com — Can I watch content on ABC.com if I'm outside the U.S.?
“Anyone physically located in the U.S. or its territories … with access to a broadband internet connection and a supported web browser. If you subscribe to ABC through one of our participating TV providers … you have access to additional content. These services are not available to anyone outside the U.S or its territories.”
help.abc.com — Who can access the shows offered on ABC.com?
The second passage keeps ABC's own punctuation error mid-sentence; we have not corrected anything inside the quotation marks. Follow either link and you will find the same wording. If a guide's description of ABC's policy sounds gentler than these two paragraphs, the guide is the thing that changed, not the policy.
Answered from ABC's own help pages and from what Disney actually changed in October 2025 — including the question where the honest answer is that your shows are still there and you do not need us.
Not from an Italian address. ABC's help page says it in a single sentence: “No; ABC.com is only available if you're physically located within the U.S. or its territories (including Puerto Rico, Guam, Saipan, American Samoa, U.S. Virgin Islands).” Italy is not on that list, and no Italian subscription opens abc.com.
No — this is the question we get most from Italy and the answer is reassuring. Disney renamed its international general-entertainment tile from Star to Hulu on 8 October 2025. Same place in the app, different badge. ABC series sit under it exactly as they did before. Nothing was taken away from you; the label changed and the search you did afterwards failed because you were searching for the old name.
Disney+ Italy, under the Hulu tile that replaced Star. Coverage is negotiated title by title rather than network-wide, so check the specific series instead of assuming the whole ABC schedule crossed. If you already pay for Disney+, this is a free check and worth doing before you read the rest of this page.
abc.com itself. Italian licences buy series; they do not buy ABC's website. The free ad-supported tier ABC publishes on its own site — a rotating selection of recent episodes and clips, no account required — is U.S.-only, and so is the extra content ABC unlocks for U.S. pay-TV subscribers.
The base tier is free and ad-supported. No account, no card. That makes ABC genuinely different from every other service we cover: for that tier a U.S. location is not step one of also paying someone, it is the entire fix. The paid layers belong to other companies — a U.S. pay-TV provider, or Hulu for full seasons.
No, anywhere. ABC's help page states: “The ABC mobile and streaming device apps are no longer available.” Disney retired the mobile and streaming-device apps, so ABC's own content is reached in a web browser. For this guide it removes a whole category of problem — no Apple Account country, no Google Play region, nothing to sideload.
Free ABC.com content, needing only a U.S. location. Additional ABC.com content after signing in with a participating U.S. TV provider. And next-day full episodes and full seasons on Hulu, a separate paid subscription. USip supplies a U.S. location. It does not supply a TV-provider account or a Hulu subscription, and we would rather write that here than let you find out later.
Yes, on the same help page: “Anyone physically located in the U.S. or its territories … with access to a broadband internet connection and a supported web browser. If you subscribe to ABC through one of our participating TV providers … you have access to additional content. These services are not available to anyone outside the U.S or its territories.” Quoted exactly as published, stray full stop included. The second half is the part most summaries drop.
No, and this one catches people out. A third-party DNS resolver changes how domain names are turned into addresses. It does not change the address your traffic leaves from, and that address is the only thing ABC's location check reads. DNS is a useful tool for other problems; it is not a location tool.
Because addresses carry history, and on an Italian line that history is often not yours. Carrier-grade NAT is common here — fixed-wireless and mobile-based home broadband especially — which means hundreds of subscribers can be presenting the same public address to a website at the same time. What that address looks like to a streaming service is the sum of what all of those people did with it.
It is the same mechanism, concentrated. A commercial VPN endpoint in a datacentre range can be shared by thousands of subscribers, and streaming services score addresses as well as countries. A residential line used by one household has the profile of a home connection because that is what it is. That is an advantage rather than a promise — ABC can block any address, including this one.
You have cleared layer one — that prompt only appears to visitors ABC accepts as being in the U.S. What it is telling you is that this title sits behind a pay-TV sign-in. The list is U.S. operators; no Italian provider is on it and none will be, and a U.S. address does not create an account with any of them.
Nothing on ABC's free tier needs a card at all. If you go on to Hulu, that is a U.S. product with U.S. billing rules, your bank may add a non-euro transaction fee, and the billing-address field is where we stop offering help. We are not going to suggest inventing one — fabricated details are exactly what these services' terms prohibit.
Frequently, and it is the cheapest thing to rule out. Managed networks block the ports a tunnel needs or force their own resolver. If the same setup works on a phone's mobile hotspot and fails on the building's Wi-Fi, the building is the problem and nothing on the laptop will fix it.
Yes — VPNs are ordinary business and privacy tools and using one is lawful. What is at issue on this page is contractual rather than criminal: ABC restricts its services to people physically in the U.S. and its territories, and the realistic consequence of a mismatch is an address being blocked. We are not your lawyers and this is not legal advice.
ABC.com is U.S.-only everywhere, but what is already licensed locally varies a great deal — and that is what decides whether any of this is worth doing.
Every quotation and date above comes from one of these. Italian subscription prices move and we have quoted none, because we could not verify them to the standard the rest of this page is held to.
If the reason you are here is that the Star section vanished from Disney+, the fix is free: it is called Hulu now and the catalogue never moved. Open the app and look. We would rather lose a sale than sell you a connection for a problem that turned out to be a rename.
If what you want is abc.com's own free tier, no Italian subscription reaches it, and a residential U.S. IP presents the U.S. location ABC's first check reads — from a residential address rather than a datacentre one. It does not supply a TV-provider account or a Hulu subscription, ABC can block any address, and you have all of that in front of you.
USip supplies the residential U.S. IP connection only. ABC.com, TV-provider accounts, Hulu subscriptions and content rights belong to Disney and its partners, and ABC can block any address.