A while ago,I wrote a blog post about legal television and movies for expats, using streaming services combined with a VPN.

Unfortunately it looks like things are changing: movie studios are fighting back against our outrageous attempt to give them our money, by blocking these VPN services.

No doubt, if this escalates, they’ll certainly find the range my current VPN provider uses and block it, and I’ll be stuck with what’s available in Germany. Thankfully, the situation has improved a lot - Netflix and Amazon both stream in Germany now, but still mostly crappy dubbed content. A very limited selection of Original Version (OV) content is available that falls far short of what’s streamable in the U.S.

Most television shows take years to become available here due to complex localization and licensing requirements. Movies take less time, but still not on par with the U.S., Sony completely ignored the rest of the world when they launched The Interview, for example.

The internet has no borders. Please stop building artificial ones. :-(