If you travel outside the United States, you may sorely discover that your video streaming subscription may be blocked, the minute you try to watch a movie on your personal device. The reason this happens is because movie studios license their movies based on region. So, in other words, if you only have access to movies licensed to Netflix in the United States, you can only watch it in the United States. And if you are outside the US, then your video streaming subscription will be “geo-blocked”, based on the region of your accessing IP address. The only way to access your video streaming service outside the US is through a virtual private network (VPN) with an American IP address. I know… it’s such a hassle.

However, there may be a glimmer of hope. Recently, there has been some suggestions that Netflix might be planning to fix this issue. Reed Hasting, the CEO of Netflix has suggested as much when he said that “the basic solution is for Netflix to get global and have its content to be the same all around the world so there’s no incentive to [use a VPN]. 

As a weary global traveler residing much of the time outside the US, I can only keep my fingers crossed for Netflix to make this happen. They really should, because dividing up content view-ability based on region is “so DVD” and makes no sense anymore.