I’m afraid your IP address is to blame. BBC Iplayer looks up the location of your IP address. BBc Iplayer will only work if it’s a UK IP address.

If your IP address is in another country tough.

So outside the UK BBC IPlayer and all UK TV are blocked ?

But all is not lost, there are ways to Watch UK TV. The solution is to make sure that your connection has a UK IP address. If you’re technically minded the best free method is to route through a pc in the UK.

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. I had huge difficulties with performance though.

My connection upload speed couldn’t cope with video streaming and was awful. 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 ? 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 a treat!