Netflix Ethiopia is getting better — and a US VPN can make it worse

There is a habit here of treating American Netflix as the real Netflix and everything else as a cut-down version. It was a fair assumption for years. It is increasingly wrong, and acting on it can leave you with less to watch than you started with.

What we noticed

Working through customer accounts we kept seeing titles on the Ethiopian catalogue that are simply not on Netflix in the United States. Rick and Morty is the clearest example. Point a VPN at the US to go and find it and it disappears, because Netflix US does not have it.

That is not Netflix being inconsistent. Back in 2015 the rights holder signed a deal that put the show exclusively on another service in the United States, so American Netflix has never been able to carry it. In North America it lives on HBO Max and Hulu instead. Outside that deal, Netflix has been free to license it — and in a lot of countries it has.

Netflix is not one catalogue

This is the part worth internalising. Netflix is not a single library with some countries locked out of parts of it. It is a different licensing negotiation in every territory, and a show's home changes depending on where you are standing.

So the mental model "US = everything, Ethiopia = leftovers" is not how it works. Some things are only on the US catalogue. Some things are only on ours. A US VPN swaps one set for the other rather than adding to it.

Which means a VPN is a trade, not an upgrade

We sell ExpressVPN and we will still tell you this: switching your Netflix region is not a free win.

• You lose whatever your own catalogue carries that the US one does not.
• Netflix actively detects and blocks VPN traffic, so it works until one evening it does not, usually mid-episode.
• It does nothing whatsoever for payment. Region and billing currency are separate problems, which is the whole reason Ethiopian cards get declined.

A VPN is worth paying for on its own merits — public wifi, privacy, getting at things that are genuinely region-locked. Chasing a bigger Netflix is the weakest reason to buy one.

The honest caveat

Licences rotate. A show sitting on the Ethiopian catalogue today can leave at the end of a contract, and that happens in batches across whole groups of countries at once. So do not read this as a promise about any particular title — read it as a reason to check your own catalogue before you assume something is missing.

Search the title on your own account first. It takes ten seconds and it is more reliable than any list, including this one.

What this changes about what to buy

Mostly it should make you more relaxed. A standard Netflix subscription on the Ethiopian catalogue is a better product than it was two years ago, and for most people it is the whole answer. Our plan guide covers picking between them, and the only question that really matters is how many of you are watching at once.

Written by the Bezuale Solutions team in Addis Ababa. Questions? Message us on Telegram.