Fourteen. That's roughly how many hotel routers, Airbnb boxes, and co-working wifi networks my ExpressVPN app has fought through since I swapped a desk in London for a laptop bag and a design contract I assumed would last a few months. Somewhere around wifi network number seven, streaming abroad stopped being a nice-to-have and turned into the actual test of whether a VPN was worth its monthly bill. Quick disclosure before anything else: some of the links in this VPN review are affiliate links, and if you sign up through one I earn a commission at no extra cost to you; I've paid for and used every service named here myself, across three different countries, so nothing below is a paid puff piece.
Does ExpressVPN Really Unblock BBC iPlayer and Hulu From Abroad?
Yes, more consistently than anything else I've tried, though "unblock" undersells what's actually happening. Streaming platforms decide what you're allowed to watch based on where your IP address says you are — geo-blocking, in the term nobody outside a VPN forum ever actually uses — and BBC iPlayer in particular is strict about requiring a UK-based address. ExpressVPN's UK servers have gotten me into iPlayer and Hulu on nearly every attempt across Lisbon, Bangkok, and Mexico City, which is more than I can say for the cheaper apps I tried first. Netflix is a slightly different game, since it's less about a hard block and more about which country's catalogue you land on, and I've managed to keep my UK Netflix library going through most of the past year without much fuss.
The Eight-Device Limit, and Why It Matters More Than You'd Think
My partner works from wherever I do, which means every move involves two phones, two laptops, a tablet, and a travel router permanently drawing power from whatever socket we can find, and ExpressVPN caps you at eight simultaneous connections (which sounds like plenty until you count every screen in the flat). We hit that ceiling faster than expected, mostly because the travel router counts as a device the second it connects. One of the best things about ExpressVPN is that it rarely feels flaky even once you're near that limit, but a friend from the nomad circuit, Bram, who insists on split-tunnelling every setup whether it needs it or not, is also the one who pointed out that some VPNs now let two devices talk to each other directly and securely through the tunnel — handy, apparently, for sending him a project file without messing about with a shared drive, though I've never bothered setting it up myself. If you're two people trying to stream, video call, and back up photos at the same time, Surfshark and its unlimited device count start to look tempting, even if I've found their streaming unblocking a little more hit-or-miss than Express.
Switching From Hotel Wifi to Mobile Data Without Losing the Call
Lightway is ExpressVPN's own protocol, and the best argument for paying more is how it behaves when you switch networks mid-stream. I watched my partner's video call survive a jump from patchy hotel wifi to a phone hotspot while we were racing to catch a flight, tunnel intact, without the call even flickering. Hotel wifi is also where obfuscation quietly earns its keep — some hotel routers block VPN traffic outright, mistaking it for something suspicious, and a VPN that disguises its own traffic gets through gates a plain connection wouldn't. Cafes are a different problem: encrypting your connection on public wifi is the boring, unglamorous reason to run a VPN there at all, since it's less about unblocking Hulu and more about not broadcasting your laptop's traffic to whoever else is logged onto the same network.
None of that erases the odd stretch of proper misery. There was an 11pm night in a Lisbon Airbnb where I sat watching a buffering spinner turn for what felt like ten straight minutes on wifi that clearly hated me, long before ExpressVPN sorted itself out. The nights it worked were almost anticlimactic by comparison — the BBC Two owl blinked onto the screen at full resolution with no spinning wheel at all, like the stream had been waiting for me the whole time.
ExpressVPN's Price vs. NordVPN and Surfshark
Reuben, a nomad I got properly acquainted with at a meetup in Lisbon, has a rule: he won't touch a subscription that doesn't let him cancel month to month, no matter how good the annual deal looks on paper. It's not a bad instinct. ExpressVPN costs more than the competition, plain and simple, and after enough months of paying it I started asking myself the same question Reuben would ask. The honest answer is that reliability bought back enough of my evenings that I stopped resenting the bill, but if budget matters more to you than not having to think about any of this, NordVPN is the sensible middle ground, especially since their how to use NordVPN on public café Wi-Fi guide covers a threat-protection feature that filters out trackers and ads before they load (most people never notice it happening at all). If you just want the longest window to test the water before committing, CyberGhost VPN gives you the most generous refund period of the three.
Disney+, Amazon Prime, and Other Streaming Issues
Amazon Prime Video throws the coldest error message of the bunch — a flat proxy-or-unblocker warning that has less to do with whether your VPN is actually working and more to do with proxy detection systems flagging IP ranges that too many people share at once. A dedicated IP, one that isn't recycled across hundreds of other subscribers, is usually what gets around it, though I haven't paid extra for one myself. Disney+ has its own quirk: the region your account sees depends on some quiet region-spoofing under the hood, a fancier way of saying the app trusts your VPN's chosen country more than it trusts your actual location. YouTube TV is stricter again, since it checks your home area on top of your IP address and will boot you mid-episode if the two stop matching. None of this is really an ExpressVPN problem specifically — it's the whole industry's problem, and every VPN I've tried trips over at least one of these occasionally.
Setting Up ExpressVPN as Digital-Nomad Gear on a Smart TV or Travel Router
Smart TVs are where this whole setup nearly fell apart. In a Mexico City apartment, I spent the better part of an evening trying to sideload a VPN app onto a budget smart TV, only to realize the firmware hadn't updated in months and nothing was going to install until it did — a very specific kind of stupid that only reveals itself close to midnight. Platform compatibility is the unglamorous skill in all of this: ExpressVPN's app works cleanly enough across phone, laptop, and most smart TVs that I've mostly stopped worrying about it, though a Fire Stick still occasionally needs a restart before it recognizes the connection at all (mine does, more often than I'd like). Surfshark's Smart DNS option is worth knowing about too, since some Samsung and LG TVs won't run a full VPN app but will accept a DNS setting instead, which is a workaround rather than a proper tunnel.
Back at the flat we're renting for now in Graça, the actual base between trips to Bangkok and Mexico City, the setup is almost embarrassingly analogue. A travel router sits permanently plugged in on the table next to both our laptops, one kitchen drawer has quietly become the place where every adapter, spare SIM, and ethernet cable in the flat ends up, and there's a small cluster of sticky notes by the desk tracking which server actually worked for iPlayer last time (because the usual one stops being reliable roughly once a month). It's not elegant. It works.
The One Thing That Never Worked For Me
Before I'd even heard of ExpressVPN, my first fix for missing iPlayer was asking my sister back in Stockport to just stay logged into her account and share her screen with me over a video call so I could watch along in real time. It was miserable. The video call itself ate bandwidth, the stream inside the stream lagged half a second behind everything she said, and she got understandably fed up with being my personal relay every week. That workaround lasted about as long as it took me to realize a proper VPN would solve the actual problem instead of working around it badly.
Three continents in, reliability is the only thing I still pay extra for. ExpressVPN unblocks BBC iPlayer and Hulu more consistently than the cheaper options I've tried, Lightway holds up when we switch networks mid-call, and the app is simple enough that I'm not troubleshooting it at midnight anymore. The eight-device cap and the higher price are trade-offs I've made peace with, not dealbreakers. If your priority is genuinely not thinking about any of this while you move between countries, ExpressVPN is the one to get.