Watching BBC Iplayer Abroad
May have found out that you get blocked accessing Iplayer outside the UK. So do you want to know how they stop you??
The reason is simply 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 need do is ensure that your connection has a UK address. If you have some technical knowledge, the best free route is to go through your own UK pc.
If you can leave a PC on in UK and connect via SSH or VPN tunneling you’ll be fine. This creates a little encrypted tunnel between two computers, 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. Unfortunately the problem when I did this was performance.
My upload speed simply wasn’t good enough and it was not usable. The upload speed on your home connection is vital to making this work, mine was hopeless. 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. Worked great except the BBC don’t like these companies set up with the intention of bypassing their restrictions so guess what they do ? The BBC legal department threaten and complain to the ISPs and hosting companies, next thing you know their website disappears.
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 a treat!
