Love the BBC but found out the bad news that you get blocked when you try to access outside the UK. Would you like to know how they stop you watching BBC IPlayer Abroad?
Well it’s all down to your IP address. The BBc Iplayer looks up your IP address and where it’s from. If it’s a UK address then the IPlayer will work. If your IP address is in another country tough.
So basically outside UK, no BBC Iplayer and no BBC TV ?
But all is not lost, there are ways to Watch UK TV. All you have to do is make sure that your connection comes from a UK based IP address. If you’re technically minded the best free method is to route through a pc in the UK.
Leave on a PC at home in UK and connect via SSH or VPN tunnel. The VPN is an encrypted tunnel between the two computers involved , in my case it was my laptop and my LInux server at home.
Have a look at a program called Putty, it can connect to windows or linux.
Then redirected your browser to use a local proxy connected through this SSH tunnel. It’s not that difficult to do, and you won’t get blocked. I had major problems with performance though.
My connection struggled to relay the video through my home server and frankly the service was unusable. Remember the upload speed on your UK side is the key to making this work. The other option that people can use to watch BBC Iplayer and UK TV is to use a slingbox, but again my poor UK connection speed made that unusable, might be good for many people though.
So I moved to the private TV proxy services, and at first that worked well, you get a private proxy to watch TV for in exchange for a small fee. The BBC target the TV proxy companies and you’ll figure out what they do ? Well they complain to the hosting companies, or ISPs and generally your TV proxy company just dissappears over night, it’s not illegal to use their service but of course most people don’t want the hassle.
I finally settled for a program which delivered BBC Iplayer through a secure network of private proxies, it has a software front end, support teams and is not marketed in any way as a TV proxy program. It works wonderfully and extremely quickly on most connections!
