Free Movies, Videos & TV

There are a lot of people from Britain living abroad and every once in a while they get a little homesick and would like to watch some authentic British television. One of the ways to do this is to use iPlayer, but how does this work exactly? You may have tried and have had the experience of getting the announcement that iPlayer is only available within the United Kingdom.

The BBC has built in restrictions to the service of iplayer, which means that iPlayer checks the physical whereabouts of the internet provider which is used to log on to the net. If this location happens to be outside of the United Kingdom, access is being denied. So the logical thing to do seems to mislead the restrictions by letting it think that your provider is located within the boundaries of the United Kingdom.

You may have some friends or family back in the UK who can give you access to their computer. This way you can build your own private network and you can use the internet connection from the computer located in the UK to log on to the net, letting iPlayer think you are in the UK and therefore have the right to have access. Downside here is that you have to have access to the UK based computer whenever you wish to watch and there can be some technicality issues with the download and upload speed which can delay the footage.

Then there is the option of finding a proxy service which is free of charge. These proxy services can also make it look like your PC makes the connection in the UK, but the only problem is that there are so many people making use of these free services, the proxy gets overloaded and gets too slow to provide all these users enough speed to watch a reasonable quality of television.

The last option is to enlist for a paid service. You might not like this, but there is a service who provides good service for a good price. There is a piece of software called Identity Cloaker. This software provides you with a high speed premium UK proxy as well as UK VPN option. This will make it possible for you to watch iPlayer from abroad. You can watch live or download the programs to watch them later on. To test it out, there is a trial period of ten days available (there is also a free trial, but this is very limited and won’t allow you to watch iPlayer from abroad) for a couple of euros and after that the monthly fee is a little under seven euros per month, which is a small sacrifice to make to feel at home.

Since iPlayer is a service provided by the BBC for UK residents who have paid television license fees, it has a restriction for people who don’t live in the United Kingdom. If you try to log onto the service outside the UK, you will get the announcement that you are not allowed to watch iPlayer. This is not a very hard problem to resolve, it is just a matter of deceiving the service. You have to let the service think that you currently are present in the United Kingdom and therefore have every right to use the services of iPlayer. First you must ask yourself the question – do I think I have the right to do this? If not, close this page. But if so, then the question arises how do you deceive the service? There are different ways to achieve this.

There is a software program available which is known as Identity Cloaker and this piece of software can be used for watching iPlayer live as well as for downloading the TV programs to watch later on. The software gives you the opportunity to make use of a UK VPN and UK proxy server. This way you can surf your way through a secured proxy tunnel and connect to the service of iPlayer. Because you enter the service through a secured tunnel, the security of iPlayer is not able to detect the fact that you are not physically within the boundaries of the United Kingdom.

There are also TV proxy servers available that allow people who live abroad to have access to the services of iPlayer. The only condition is that you have to be in possession of a BBC TV license, otherwise you can’t use the service. There are also some server companies who offer you the use of proxy servers especially for users who are based outside of the United Kingdom. However these services charge you for their services. The fees that are being asked for a one year service are somewhere in between 120 and 180 pounds. If you are in possession of a Mac computer, the answer for you would be to use Slingbox.

The last option you have when you would like to watch your favorite UK TV shows is to stay in touch with your friends and family in the UK. You need a computer which is present within the United Kingdom so you can create a VPN (Virtual Private Network) tunnel. This way you can access the service of iPlayer through the computer based in the UK. Downside for this method is that the download speed is negatively influenced.

There still are some other free proxy servers available, but the problem of a slow speed connection also applies to these services and next to that, to set up proxy services when you don’t know what you’re doing is rather difficult to do.