About Unblock Couch

In early 2022 I took a remote design contract in Lisbon with one suitcase and the quietly wrong assumption that Netflix would just work anywhere. It didn't. BBC iPlayer especially didn't. I missed two episodes of University Challenge before I had my first VPN sorted.

Three years on, I'm still doing this. Lisbon, then Bangkok, then Mexico City, then some version of that cycle again. The rented apartments change. The streaming problems don't. What has changed is that I now pay for two VPN subscriptions simultaneously, because iPlayer has a specific grudge against one of them that rotates on no schedule I've ever managed to predict.

This site is where I write down what actually works and what doesn't, in the specific situation of someone living abroad with a UK streaming habit and a partner who notices immediately when the connection goes wrong during his video calls. I'm not a network engineer. I'm not a security researcher. What I am is someone who has set up a VPN on a hotel television at 2am in a country where the remote was labeled in a language I couldn't read.

Every guide here comes from a real setup, in a real place, at a real point in time. If a service stopped working with a specific library, it's because I watched the error message appear. If it worked, I watched it load. When I say something is worth trying, it's because I tried it.

Meet the person behind the writing on the author page.

Some links here are affiliate links. If you sign up for a service through one of them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend services I have paid for and used myself while traveling.