Last month I flew from Los Angeles to Berlin for a work thing, with a layover in London. I had my Crunchyroll queue loaded, my Netflix downloads ready, and roughly fourteen hours of transit time to burn. What I did not have was access to half my library the moment I landed at Heathrow.
The Crunchyroll app reshuffled itself based on my UK IP. Shows I’d been watching disappeared. Others I’d never seen popped up. Netflix did the same thing when I got to Germany, except worse, because the German catalog dropped most of the anime I was mid-season on and replaced it with a bunch of local reality programming. I sat in my hotel room in Kreuzberg trying to finish Frieren and getting told it wasn’t available in my region. Frieren. One of the most popular anime of the past two years. Gone.
So I did what every frustrated nerd abroad eventually does. I started testing VPNs.
Streaming Libraries Are Regional and Nobody Warns You
This is not news to anyone who’s traveled internationally, but the scale of the difference still caught me off guard. Netflix’s US library has roughly 6,300 titles. The UK gets around 5,800. Germany sits closer to 4,500. For anime specifically, the gaps are even wider because licensing deals for Japanese animation are negotiated territory by territory, and the distributor in one country is often a completely different company than in another.
Crunchyroll’s catalog shifts less dramatically between regions, but it still varies. Certain Funimation-legacy titles that merged into Crunchyroll after Sony’s 2022 consolidation are only available in North America. Hidive, the smaller anime platform, has its own regional restrictions. And if you’re trying to watch anything on Japanese streaming services like ABEMA or dAnime Store from outside Japan, you’re blocked entirely.
I knew VPNs could help with this. What I didn’t know was how much the experience varies between providers when you’re trying to stream anime specifically. Anime platforms are surprisingly aggressive about VPN detection compared to, say, general entertainment services.
What I Ended Up Using (and Why)
I tested three services over a week: Proton VPN’s free tier, NordVPN on a friend’s shared account, and ExpressVPN on its three-day mobile trial. The results were not what I expected.
Proton VPN’s free tier connected fine and masked my location, but Crunchyroll detected it almost immediately. I got maybe ten minutes into an episode before the stream cut. Netflix wouldn’t load at all on the free servers. Proton’s paid tier is reportedly better for streaming, but I was testing the free version and it wasn’t usable for this purpose.
NordVPN worked on Netflix from the first server I tried. Crunchyroll was spottier. Some US servers got flagged, others didn’t. It took about four attempts to find one that held a stable connection through a full episode. Not terrible, but not instant either.
ExpressVPN was the most consistent of the three. I connected to a US server using their Lightway protocol, and both Netflix and Crunchyroll loaded my full American library within seconds. No detection, no buffering, no mid-episode drops over three days of testing. The speed was genuinely impressive: I was streaming 1080p on hotel Wi-Fi in Berlin, which is usually a recipe for buffering hell. ExpressVPN has completed 23 independent security audits as of January 2026, including protocol reviews by Cure53 and a no-logs verification by KPMG in mid-2025. Gizmodo published a fairly thorough write-up on the service that covers the speed benchmarks, the Lightway protocol details, and how it performs across different streaming platforms. It matched my experience closely, which is rare for VPN reviews.
The catch, obviously, is price. ExpressVPN starts at $3.49/month on a two-year plan, which is reasonable but not free. After the trial ended, I paid for a month at full price ($12.95) because I still had a week left in Europe and I wasn’t going back to the Crunchyroll roulette. Whether that’s worth it long-term depends on how often you travel and how much you care about maintaining your library abroad.
Anime Platforms Fight VPNs Harder Than You’d Think
I want to flag something that surprised me. General-purpose streaming apps (Netflix, Disney+, Max) have VPN detection, sure, but it’s inconsistent. You get blocked on one server, try another, and you’re usually fine. Anime-specific platforms are different.
Crunchyroll in particular has gotten much more aggressive since the Sony acquisition. Their detection seems to flag not just known VPN IP ranges but also behavioral patterns: rapid region switches, multiple sessions from the same account on different continents within hours, that sort of thing. I got a soft ban on my Crunchyroll account for about six hours after switching between UK and US servers too quickly on Proton. It resolved itself, but it was annoying.
Hidive was less strict but had its own weirdness. Some shows that should have been available with a US IP still showed as region-locked, which makes me think their licensing backend doesn’t always update in real time when you change locations. ABEMA and dAnime Store were essentially impossible without a Japanese IP, and even then, dAnime requires a Japanese payment method, so a VPN alone won’t help.
What This Actually Costs Per Year
Here’s the math I did on the plane home. I pay $7.99/month for Crunchyroll Premium. $15.49 for Netflix Standard. $4.99 for Hidive. That’s $341 per year in anime-adjacent streaming subscriptions alone. Adding a VPN at $3.49/month (annual plan) puts me at $383. Adding it at $12.95/month if I’m only paying for travel months (say, three months a year) is $380.
For that extra $40, I got access to my full library from any country I visited, plus the baseline privacy benefit of encrypted browsing on airport and hotel Wi-Fi. I’m not going to pretend the privacy angle is what motivated me. I wanted to watch Frieren in my hotel room. But the encryption on public networks is a genuine bonus, especially for anyone logging into accounts from random European Wi-Fi networks that may or may not be run by someone trustworthy.
The Uncomfortable Reality of Paying for Content You Can’t Access
I pay for Crunchyroll. I pay for Netflix. I pay for Hidive. I am, by any reasonable definition, a paying customer. And yet the moment I board a plane, I lose access to shows I’m in the middle of watching, not because I stopped paying, but because I moved. That’s the part that still bugs me.
Geo-licensing exists for reasons that make sense to lawyers and distributors. It does not make sense to the person who’s paid their subscription, packed their laptop, and wants to finish episode nine of something before their layover ends. VPNs fill the gap that the industry created and refuses to close. Whether that’s a workaround or a correction depends on how you look at it. I know which side I’m on.
