The flight lands, the hotel wifi connects, and the Continue Watching row has quietly rearranged itself. Two of the four shows sitting there yesterday are gone, a film that was three clicks away last week has vanished from search, and the app is behaving as though it has never met you. Nothing has been cancelled, and nobody has been logged out. A subscription is a stack of separate agreements signed country by country, and crossing a border switches which stack the app is allowed to show.
The Same App, The Same Login, A Different Shelf
Every request an app makes carries a return address. Before the home screen renders, the service reads where that request surfaced onto the internet, matches it to a market, and assembles the catalogue it holds rights for in that market. The account is checked afterwards, and only to work out which profile and which plan apply.
That order explains the strangeness of the experience. The login is intact, the payment is intact, the watch history is intact, and the shelf is different, because the shelf was never a property of the account in the first place.
The lever most travellers reach for is the one that changes that return address, and you can download the ExpressVPN app here, allowing you to access the service’s catalogue from your home jurisdiction.
The scale of the sorting is easier to grasp with a count. The European Audiovisual Observatory, part of the Council of Europe, reported in June 2026 that the number of audiovisual media services and video-sharing platforms available across wider Europe rose 5% between December 2024 and December 2025, with on-demand services growing 15% against 1% for television channels. The Observatory counts them country by country, because availability is a country-by-country fact before it is anything else.
What Actually Gets Bought When a Show Crosses a Border
Copyright is the reason any of this has a shape. The World Intellectual Property Organization describes it as the set of rights creators hold over their literary and artistic works, a category that runs from books and music to films and databases. Those rights are the thing that gets sold, and they get sold in pieces.
A piece is usually a territory, a window of time and a format. One buyer takes a drama for a group of countries for three years with subtitles. Another takes the same drama for a single country, starting eighteen months later, dubbed. A third holds nothing at all and the title simply never appears there.
The effect is most visible on shows that travel from smaller production markets. A Dutch thriller such as the one reviewed here reaches viewers outside the Netherlands through a chain of separate agreements, each negotiated with a different distributor, each with its own end date. When one of those agreements lapses, the title leaves that country’s catalogue and stays in every other one, which is why a show can feel cancelled and archived at the same time depending on who you ask.
Travellers Reach for Three Fixes, and Each One Changes Something Different
Downloading before departure is the oldest fix and the most misunderstood. A download carries its own licence with its own expiry, usually shorter than the streaming right behind it, and the download button appears on some titles while others offer only streaming. Two weeks in another country will outlast a fair number of those files.
Changing the return address is the second, and it is worth being precise about its reach. It changes which catalogue the service assembles for the session. It leaves the billing market of the account where it was, it leaves the profile language where it was, and it changes nothing at all about who owns the rights to the show.
Keeping a second service is the third, but that’s often an expense that has less utility than a VPN. Different buyers hold different territories, so the drama missing from one app on a Tuesday in Lisbon is frequently sitting, untouched, in the catalogue of a rival service two icons away on the same home screen.
