Do you actually need a VPN for streaming?
Less often than this corner of the internet suggests, and it is worth knowing the two big exemptions before you pay for anything.
Travelling within the EU or EEA: portability rules in force since April 2018 require paid subscription services to give you your home catalogue while you are temporarily in another member state, at no extra cost. If your usual library is already showing, a VPN adds nothing. The rules cover paid services only, temporary travel rather than relocation, and since Brexit they do not cover UK services such as BBC iPlayer.
Downloads: many paid services let you download titles to a phone or tablet before you leave, and those downloads usually keep playing abroad. Checking what your service allows before a trip is free and often answers the question.
Where a VPN has a real job:
- Keeping your home services behaving normally while you are away: banking apps, email logins and sites that get jumpy about a foreign address all behave better with an address back home.
- Working on hotel, cafe or airport networks you do not control, which is the ordinary reason to run a VPN anywhere and has nothing to do with streaming.
- Encrypting what you do from anyone else on the same network, streaming included.
Where it does not help, whatever you have read elsewhere: it is not a reliable way into another country's catalogue, and the platforms say so themselves. That is the next section, and it is the part most streaming VPN pages leave out.
What the platforms actually say about VPNs
You do not have to take our word for any of this. The restrictions are in the platforms' own documentation.
Netflix publishes a help article on watching through a VPN. It says that with a VPN "you may only be shown TV shows and movies Netflix has worldwide licensing for, like Squid Games or Stranger Things", that you "may need to turn off your VPN to see TV shows and movies that are available in your region", and that VPNs "aren't supported for watching Live events on Netflix or if you're on an ad-supported experience". Read that again: by Netflix's own account, a VPN can get you less Netflix, not more.
Hulu goes further. Its subscriber agreement limits the service to the United States and certain of its territories, restricts subscribing to residents, and prohibits "using any technology or technique to obscure or disguise your location".
BBC iPlayer requires a UK TV Licence to watch or download, wherever you are, and the BBC has said VPN use breaks its terms. NordVPN's own support article on the subject is titled "BBC doesn't work with NordVPN", which is about as honest as this industry gets. The BBC-sanctioned route for travellers is downloading programmes to a phone or tablet before you leave.
Several other major platforms publish similar restrictions. The pattern repeats: licensing is sold by country, platforms police it, and both NordVPN and Surfshark are policed like everyone else. What a VPN still does, reliably and legitimately, is encrypt your connection and give you an address back home for the services that merely get nervous about foreign logins.
Recommended VPNs for travel
NordVPN: best for short trips and month-by-month plans
It is the one for you if you are away for a couple of weeks. For a trip, a short subscription is usually the right purchase. One plan covers 10 devices, plans run by the month, the year or over two years, and each carries a 30-day money-back guarantee, so check the refund terms before you buy.
What matters for travel
- Servers in the United States and the United Kingdom
- 10 devices on a single subscription
- Independently audited no-log policy, reassessed in 2025
- Live chat support
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Surfshark: best for long stays and unlimited devices
It is the one for you if you are covering a family, or you are away for months rather than weeks. Connections are unlimited, so the laptop, both phones, the tablet and the TV all run on one subscription. It sells the same three terms and adds bonus months on the longer two, with the same 30-day money-back guarantee.
What matters for travel
- Servers in the United States and the United Kingdom
- Unlimited simultaneous connections on one plan
- Independently audited no-log policy, reassessed in 2025
- Live chat support
- 30-day money-back guarantee
Speeds and streaming quality
We do not publish speed comparisons between these two, because we do not run benchmarks and we have seen no methodology behind the numbers that circulate elsewhere. What is worth saying is structural: video is the most bandwidth-hungry thing most people do, and every extra kilometre your traffic travels adds latency. Connecting to a nearby server keeps that cost small, and both NordVPN and Surfshark publish server lists covering the United States and the United Kingdom, so if you call either home a nearby option exists. Connecting across an ocean is where video starts to suffer.
Expect friction with the platforms, and do not read it as a fault. The detection described above is real, and nobody, including us, can tell you how a given server will behave with a given service today. We would treat any quoted success rate with caution.
How to choose between them
The choice comes down to how long you need it and how many devices are coming.
NordVPN
- Servers in the US and UKYes
- Devices per plan10
- One month$14.99
- Cheapest plan$3.49 a month
- Guarantees access to any catalogueNo
- Money back guarantee30 days
Surfshark
- Servers in the US and UKYes
- Devices per planUnlimited
- One month$16.45
- Cheapest plan$2.49 a month
- Guarantees access to any catalogueNo
- Money back guarantee30 days
| Feature | NordVPN | Surfshark |
|---|
| Servers in the US and UK | Yes | Yes |
| Devices per plan | 10 | Unlimited |
| One month | $14.99 | $16.45 |
| Cheapest plan | $3.49 a month | $2.49 a month |
| Guarantees access to any catalogue | No | No |
| Money back guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
Setting up a VPN before you travel
The one piece of timing advice that genuinely matters is to do this before you go, while you are on your home connection and everything still works.
- Install and sign in. Set up NordVPN or Surfshark on the devices you actually watch on, not just your laptop.
- Download what you can first. Titles saved to your phone or tablet before you leave play abroad without any of this. Check what your services allow.
- Test everything at home, so you find out how your services behave through a VPN while you can still do something about it.
- If your app has a kill switch, turn it on so nothing leaks if the tunnel drops.
- Remember what a VPN cannot fix. Your account's registered country, your billing details and each platform's licensing are not network problems, and no amount of server switching changes them.
One caveat worth stating plainly. Where a service says in its own terms that VPN use is unsupported or prohibited, connecting through one may put you in breach of those terms, and the service is within its rights to limit what you see or act on the account. That is a decision for you to make with the facts in front of you, and this page has given you the platforms' own words to make it with.
Final recommendation
Buy a VPN for what it reliably does: an encrypted connection on networks you do not control, and an address back home for the accounts and services that behave better with one. Treat any access to a foreign catalogue as a bonus that can vanish, because the platforms' own documentation says exactly that.
Choose NordVPN for a trip: 10 devices covers most people travelling alone or as a couple.
Choose Surfshark for a household or a longer stay. It puts no limit on connections, so everyone watches on one subscription.
Both carry a 30-day money-back guarantee, which is what makes trying one a low-risk decision rather than a leap of faith.
