UK Proxy TV Access
Update – August, 2024, this post is a few years old now and I feel I should update it as it’s a little bit dated. Although the post is still entirely accurate, things have changed in the world of proxy servers, VPNs and other methods of being able to watch BBC TV anywhere in the world ! The process is still the same, hide your location and pretend to be in the UK. Yet although the range of VPN servers on the market has increased – the number that will actually work with most UK television stations has fallen significantly. Many VPN and proxy services are now routinely blocked by the BBC specifically as well as some of the other UK TV channels.
Below you’ll see I recommend the security program Identity Cloaker as a UK proxy TV service. Fortunately this has been unaffected and still works perfectly to watch BBC abroad. However it is quite expensive relative to the new comers plus it lacks versions for tablets, phones and Apple. Many of us now watch TV on our smart phones as well as computers so I thought I’d suggest an alternative version. It’s called NordVPN and is among the largest VPN services on the market, which I admit is not always a good sign. However I have been testing Nord for well over a year now and it has performed very well on my mobile, tablet and laptop. What’s more it has application versions for all popular devices too.
So please read on and see Identity Cloaker in action below on the page, it’s still a great method for watching UK TV on a computer. However if you want a cheaper alternative that included other platforms then it’s worth considering NordVPN. Their deals change all the time however if you click the graphic below then you should go to the best deal currently available.
If you’re in the same situation as me and spend a large part of your year outside the UK then this post may be worth reading. Perhaps you travel with work or have just retired in the sun, and you too miss UK TV stations. Well I certainly did although I’m not a big telly fan when I left I certainly missed British TV.
But when I am abroad the BBC news means a lot to me – so this post contains some of the options for using a UK proxy online and other methods to watch UK Television abroad easily.
So here’s my view of a summer evening in small town in South Western Turkey. Sipping a cool beer watching the sun going down I felt pretty lucky. However I really did miss my UK routine of watching the news each evening and although I get some English speaking Turkish channels it’s not quite the same as the BBC. Fortunately there are a few methods of bringing British TV Online to either your laptop, tablet, PC or TV.
How to Watch British Television Anywhere Using a UK Proxy Online
It’s not actually very hard to do, but it does involve some effort and you’ll probably come across the term UK proxy if you’ve investigated this. Most people will have tried to watch something like the BBC iPlayer and found it gets blocked due to your location. The issue is that many, many of the best sites on the internet are restricting access to specific countries – the BBC is no exception.
But don’t worry it’s easy to circumvent, and one of the most common is to use an online British proxy to hide your real location.
The reason we can’t use the internet to watch British TV stations like the BBC is because they all use something called geotargeting. This means that when you go to the BBC website for instance, it looks up your location from your IP address. The site will then decide what you are allowed to access based on your location – so for non-UK locations you cannot use BBC Iplayer or the ITV, Channel 4 equivalents.
Well of course it didn’t take long for people to figure out that if you can hide your real IP address then you’d be able to watch whatever you liked. People initially started doing this by using something called a proxy server, which is a computer which sits between you and the site you’re trying to access. If this server is based in the UK then your location would also be logged as being in the UK. Simply because the site would think you have a UK IP not the proxy server.
AND IT WORKED !!!
Well up until 2016 it did, although it was always difficult to find a free UK proxy server to use for TV. You did have to search for hours to find a good one and then restart the search every time you needed access. The free ones were usually overloaded in a few hours and usually unusable for streaming videos. Most people gave up on this method unless they happened to know the administrator of a UK proxy server.
Here’s a handy link for checking out the location of whichever proxy server you find – Geo-IP Checker, remember the IP address of the proxy must correspond to the country you need. So for the BBC and all the UK TV stations you need a British IP address.
Using this method, you had to input the proxy settings manually into your browser – under IE they’re under Tools/Internet Options/Connections/LAN settings, this is the screen you’ll need –
Click the ‘use a proxy’ box and then input the IP address of the proxy server you’ve found, then simply restart IE and browse to the BBC Iplayer site. As long as the proxy server you’ve found is based in the UK it should work. IF you do use a free UK proxy online then ITS VERY IMPORTANT -to remove these settings after you’ve finished watching the BBC. Make sure you never use these proxies to do anything else as many are hacked and monitored by identity thieves and hackers looking to steal passwords and account details. In reality, you’ll probably never find one fast enough to stream video for long for anything long term the best UK proxy will be a commercial one.
******UPDATE 2017 – Unfortunately this no longer works for any of the main UK TV channels, the BBC was the last to automatically block proxy servers in 2016. So unfortunately both paid and free proxies are of little use in bypassing these region locks now.*********
Use Identity Cloaker
Nowadays you have less options although this was always far superior. It is to use a commercial VPN service (virtual private network), these used to be very scarce but nowadays there are hundreds of them all with different options and services. The one I’ve always used to watch BBC iPlayer is called Identity Cloaker, you can see a demonstration here on a PC. However you can also use it on tablets, smart phones, laptops, Smart TVs and a host of others. In fact if you configure the connection on your router it will affect everything on your network.
As I said there are loads of others but the reasons I use this program is it’s owned and run by a legitimate company who’ve been in existence many years (I’ve used it for 11 years!). The software is really easy to use and gives you access to lots of servers from your taskbar. It’s definitely the simplest and safest way to get access to a UK IP address range to watch UK TV very quickly.
Try the short trial first to see if it works for you – 10 day trial of Identity Cloaker , it’s only a few euros and there are no recurring subscriptions or anything sneaky like that!