The world is a wondrous place, full of fun things to see and hear. It is also a pleasure to veg out in a hotel room and watch a few episodes of Fleabag, rewatch The Centurion for the eighteenth time, or catch up on the Embedded podcast. The dizzying array of digital and audio media offerings is a fantastic development.
However, as is true of money, credit cards, and passports, redundancy is essential because of capricious coverage and regional restrictions. There are many places in the world where these services do not work, for licensing or other opaque reasons. To my very great surprise even content that has been ‘downloaded’ has been unavailable in many countries. This is true of both video and audio. Movies purchased on Amazon can disappear from your list while outside the US. Netflix download attempts can return a ‘nope’. Even some podcast downloads have been restricted. Pandora goes offline fairly regularly and makes your downloaded library unavailable. Spotify stops completely after a fortnight out of the US. Do not be surprised if your personal ‘collection’ of music is unavailable while traveling.
Absolutely critical is to subscribe to a VPN spooofer like ExpressVPN or Ivacy. For about $100 per year. Marketed as privacy software these services attempt to disguise the physical location of your device, and have it appear to be in another location. Netflix not available in Paraguay? Use Ivacy to appear to be sitting in London instead. Stay signed out of the VPN Spoofer for most of your surfing, as most sites do not care, yet it tends to flag on Google searches and add extra steps for you.
Unsurprisingly, the streaming giants are non-plussed about this, work hard to identify spoofers, and can (unpredictably in my experience) deny access when they detect that VPN spoofers are in use.
Combine these limitations with crawling internet speeds in places like Cuba and Mauritania, or complete blackouts in Ethiopia, or state restrictions to sites in Russia, and be prepared to entertain yourself.
