UK TV offers English speakers an advert free viewing experience. The BBC is a worldwide leader in news, documentaries and current affairs. Of course the BBC also has the major benefit that everything it shows is not interrupted by advertisements every fifteen minutes which makes a huge difference.
For those living outside the UK, accessing the channels isn’t straight forward. However with the internet there are now quite a few possibilities to access UK TV from anywhere in the world.
A really good option if you live or have base in the UK is something called a slingbox. This amazing little gadget connects to a satellite or cable box in your home and then lets you watch your home TV through an internet connection. I’ve installed a few of these and they are relatively easy to set up. You can then watch whatever you like using your digital box, on your computer as long as you have an internet connection. The main requirement is to have a decent upload speed from the UK side. One minor drawback is anyone actually in the UK has to watch the same on that device.
However there are other ways of watching most of the UK TV programmes as long as you have an internet access. That is using the many web sites that all these channels have now set up. The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and 5 have all great web sites that allow you to watch many of their best programmes, in fact you can watch virtually any of the BBc channels on the Iplayer.
The one issue with accessing these is something called geotargeting which you may have come across. Basically geotargeting is the concept where your web browsing is tailored based on your IP address, sometimes this is good when it helps you find relevant search results, but very often it is used to block access to content and web sites. All that happens is that your IP address is looked up in a big database when you try and access something and if you’re outside the UK all the channels will block your access. The same happens with the US channels and all across the world.
Fortunately you can bypass these restrictions, the BBC is very straight forward you just need to use a proxy server based in the UK. You’ll find lots around the internet but beware finding a usable one to watch BBC Iplayer by proxy, can easily become a full time job as most are too slow and they disappear every day. Anyway if you find one just modify your browser settings to use the proxy address and you should be ok.
The other channels need something called a VPN and in fact most popular sites need this to access from the ‘wrong country’. If you’re technical you can set one of these up yourself but can be a little expensive, or you can use one of the private firms who supply this service. It’s quite common technology and fairly seamless to use if you buy a fast private service or set up your own properly.
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