It’s a Small Detail That Can Absolutely Ruin a Vacation. Don’t Leave Until You’ve Packed This One Piece of Tech.
Slate · L · trust 36/100
This is One Thing , a column with tips on how to live.
Sartre rightly taught us that hell is other people , but I’ve got an update for the modern world: Hell is other people’s streaming accounts. In this case, I don’t mean the HBO Max that you are stealing from your anime-obsessed brother, or the cozy restaurant piping out a quiet jazz Spotify playlist punctuated with horrifically loud car insurance ads. What concerns me here is the TV and movie streaming experience during travel, when you are at the mercy of whatever the Airbnb host or (even worse) hotel chain has pre-loaded onto their system. You know the existential dread you feel stepping into one of these content wastelands—populated by weird services that sound like fun-house mirror knockoffs of real ones , or familiar platforms like Netflix or Hulu, only deformed by a bizarre spread of programming that your algorithm, for all its faults, wouldn’t dare. It’s enough to make you want to unplug the TV altogether.
But even a vacation requires downtime, so—as much as we’d like to pretend we’ll get through that novel stuffed between toiletries and swimming trunks—we can’t give up the dream of quality streaming on the road. There has to be a better way.
An obvious option, of course, is to sign into your own accounts from the foreign devices, but this is undignified. For one thing, it requires you to recall or dig up your passwords and input all that mess with a dirty remote, which, no thanks. Same goes for hunching over a laptop when there is perfectly good screen in the room. But beyond those inconveniences, there’s just something scuzzy about unlocking your personal content sanctums in such a random public space, like taking a call from the doctor on speaker in the grocery store. And while most platforms now offer a way to log out remotely in case you forgot to amid check-out chaos, there’s still a chance that the next creeps who come through will mess up your manicured queues during the time they remain exposed.
Fortunately, there’s a solution that sidesteps all of this, and you don’t even need to buy anything new to do it: Just bring your own streaming device with you on the trip!
Not a mind-blowing concept, I know, yet you’d be surprised how few people seem to have thought of it. So let me offer a few tips. First, this assumes you are using something that is plug-and-play and portable, like a Roku or Amazon Fire stick. When you pack it, don’t neglect the power cord and, most important, the remote! Earlier this summer, I forgot my Roku remote during a trip to Chicago, and finding a workaround that put the stick, phone app (with its digital remote), and the local Wi-Fi in harmony took a good chunk of one morning—yet I persisted, and soon found myself in the streets of the Roku City I know and love.
The major point of friction with this strategy is finding the relevant port on the TV, usually HDMI. This can sometimes be hard to get at, depending on how it’s mounted, but don’t be cowed—while there have been vexing searches and tight squeezes, I’ve never truly been thwarted. Then, you’re merely obliged to find the TV’s menu and switch the source to your device and connect to the right network. Voilà, all your shows and even your local cable, if you stream that, anywhere you are (domestically, at least; my guess is that international situations might require a VPN). It’s more of a pleasure and comfort in a place far from home than you might think.
Just be sure to make a phone reminder for your departure day not to leave your device (it may blend in after a while), and to switch the TV back to its original fallen state. Because the only thing more hellish than navigating an alien streaming account is trying to get an Airbnb host or hotel staffer to mail you yours, especially with the knowledge that you’ve shunned their offerings and meddled (harmlessly!) with their tech.
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