The same service, the same price, and a catalogue that differs substantially between countries. It is the most consistently confusing thing about streaming for anybody who travels or moves.
Why the catalogues differ
Rights are sold territory by territory, and always have been.
A distributor buys the right to show something in a specific country for a specific period. A different distributor may hold it elsewhere, or nobody may.
Which means a streaming service wanting to offer a title globally must acquire it in every market separately, from whoever holds it there, at whatever price.
Frequently somebody else already holds it in a given territory, so the service cannot offer it there at any price until that arrangement expires.
This is why a service's own originals are generally available everywhere and licensed content is not.
Why it has not been fixed
Because the territorial model is worth a great deal to rights holders.
Selling the same film to twenty distributors in twenty countries generates more revenue than selling worldwide rights once, and the pricing can be tailored to each market.
Long-standing output deals commit content to particular broadcasters in particular countries for years.
And local content quota requirements in some jurisdictions oblige services to carry and commission a proportion of local production, which shapes catalogues further.
None of that is going to change soon, since it benefits the parties with the negotiating power.
What happens when you travel
Worth knowing because it surprises people.
Most services detect location and serve the local catalogue, so a subscriber abroad sees the destination's library rather than their own.
Downloads made before travelling generally continue to work, subject to a licence period, which is the practical workaround for a holiday.
Within some regions there are portability rules requiring services to provide subscribers with their home catalogue while temporarily in another member state, which works and is limited to temporary stays and to that region.
The workaround question
Since it is what people actually ask.
Routing traffic through another country to appear local is technically straightforward and widely done.
The position is that it generally breaches the service's terms rather than any criminal law in most jurisdictions, and the usual consequence is account restriction rather than anything else.
Practically, services detect and block the address ranges used by commercial providers, with reasonable effectiveness and an ongoing back-and-forth.
The result is that it works inconsistently, which is a poor basis for a subscription.
Anybody considering it should read their own service's terms and understand that the risk sits with the account rather than being theoretical.
The legitimate alternatives
Which are more useful than they sound.
Availability search services that tell you which platform holds a title in your country, which turns a fruitless browse into a direct answer.
Rental and purchase, which frequently offers titles that no subscription service carries locally, at a cost per title that compares reasonably against another subscription.
Physical media, which remains the only version unaffected by any of this and which is frequently the only way to obtain older or less commercial titles.
And public libraries, many of which lend both physical media and digital film through dedicated platforms, which is free and consistently overlooked.
The preservation angle
A consequence worth noting.
Territorial licensing means some works are legally unavailable in some countries for years at a time, and occasionally permanently, because no distributor considers them commercially worthwhile there.
For older, foreign-language and non-commercial work this is the normal situation rather than the exception.
Which is the strongest argument for the archives, the specialist distributors and the library systems that exist precisely to make such material available, and which are doing considerably more for access than any of the large services.
Why catalogues shrink over time
A related pattern that frustrates long-term subscribers.
Services acquired large licensed libraries during the growth phase, when the priority was having enough content to justify a subscription.
As the emphasis shifted to originals and to cost control, expensive licensed content was not renewed, and catalogues in several markets have contracted noticeably.
Which means the library you subscribed for is not the library you have, and the direction of travel is toward fewer licensed titles and more originals.
The consolidation effect
The other force acting on catalogues.
As studios launched their own services, they withdrew their content from competitors, which fragmented libraries across more subscriptions.
The consequence for a viewer is that the total cost of access to the same set of films has risen substantially, which is the practical result of vertical integration and is unlikely to reverse.
Bundling has emerged as a partial response, and it recreates something close to the cable packages that streaming was supposed to replace.
Checking before subscribing
The practical step that avoids most disappointment.
Availability search services list, by country, which platform carries a given title, and they are free.
Checking five or six titles you actually want before taking a subscription takes a few minutes and is a considerably better basis than the marketing, which emphasises originals rather than the library.
It is also worth checking whether the titles are included with the subscription or only available to rent, since search results frequently conflate the two.