The BBC’s iPlayer offers real UK TV over the Internet but not to viewers overseas. You can unblock it quite easily, however, and get ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 too, not to mention Hulu. I live in Bangkok but, tonight, I’ll be watching three episodes of Dr Who back-to-back from behind the sofa.
BBC iPlayer allows viewers to watch, on demand, almost any BBC TV show screened within the last seven days. Hosted on the BBC website, it works very much like YouTube. Video is streamed at anything up to full HD quality so it’s not confined to some crappy little window on your monitor. BBC iPlayer is big-screen entertainment.
If your connection is too slow for streaming (under 500 kbps), you can download your favourite shows to the BBC iPlayer Desktop and watch them up to a month later.
For the discerning viewer, this package is a big step up from the popular but narrowly focussed BBC Entertainment channel recently dumped by TrueVisions. In a previous article, I also explored a couple of other UK TV options available to Thailand’s satellite TV subscribers.
In the past, telly-deprived British expats used a variety of techniques to circumvent the BBC’s mean-spirited restrictions on overseas viewers, but the broadcaster has worked tirelessly to stop them. These days, the only bullet-proof way to access BBC iPlayer from abroad is to connect via a computer located in the UK. Fortunately, this is easy to arrange and impossible to detect.
Later, you just connect to the Internet as usual via your Thai ISP and then click open a network connection to the UK. No special software is required and everything on your PC or Mac works exactly the same as it did before – except that you can now watch your favourite TV shows.
The set-up is called a virtual private network (VPN). As an added bonus, Thailand’s official nannies and snoopers can no longer censor your web browsing or read your private emails.
My True Internet broadband connection (allegedly 7Mbps) will stream UK TV at all but the busiest times of day. Actual connection speeds rarely exceed 1Mbps but the screen resolution is no worse than TrueVisions’ satellite TV. Some buffering usually occurs during the opening credits but the picture quickly settles down. Downloads to the BBC iPlayer Desktop play flawlessly at full HD resolution.
To begin watching UK TV in Thailand, the first and most crucial step is to find a specialist UK-based VPN hosting provider (not to be confused with the ubiquitous shared web-hosting providers – which don’t allow VPN). Fortunately, new VPN hosting companies are springing up all the time and monthly subscriptions start from as little as five pounds. It’s a great option because all you have to do is sign up, change a few settings on your computer and start watching UK TV.
In theory, you can do all this for free by installing an Apache server on the computer of a broadband-connected friend or relative in the UK but it’s a lot of hassle and your download speed will be limited by their upload speed. Furthermore, when she’s making a cup of tea, your mother will almost certainly unplug the computer during the FA Cup final.
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Tried it. Liked it. Thanks.
But how do I do that?
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.