It seems quite something that after all these years, there are still geographic restrictions in place on what you can watch. If you live in the UK, you can access a whole range of streaming services now, but there’s no guarantee that what you’ve got available to watch at your fingertips is the same as the similar service in, say, America.

In fact, it simply isn’t. Regional variations in what can be found on streaming services are quite pronounced, generally the result of complicated rights problems which the average viewer at the end of it all struggles to care in the slightest about.

Is it any wonder that more and more of us are turning to a Virtual Private Network to get around the problem?

Better know as a VPN, this can fool an online service into thinking you’re in a different country to the one you’re actually in. As such, it unlocks the ability to watch material that otherwise would only be available elsewhere in the world.

Why do we have to do this though? Those who lived through the DVD era will already have less than fond memories of ‘regional coding’, whereby major film studios would try and stop you watching a film bought in one country on the hardware of another.

It was as an frustrating then as it’s frustrating now. These are customers after all who want to do the right thing and legally pay for their films. There’s no law that stops you importing a DVD from another country, just as there’s no law that stops you paying for a streaming service outside of the territory in which you live. Yet technology companies are aiding the film and TV industry by doing their utmost to block access to material.

These aren’t people who are trying to pirate or steal their material either. These are the legal paying customers, who are happy to hand over their credit card to be able to watch what they want. Yet over 20 years since the world wide web became mainstream, there’s still a bunch of companies intent on making that as difficult as possible.

It beggars belief, but at least there’s something that can be done about it. However, at a time when film and TV companies are complaining that their profits are being squeezed and that audiences are dwindling, it might just be time for a good number of them to take a good, long hard look in the mirror.