How to Watch ITV in Spain with a VPN in 2024
Many holiday makers, expats and soap fans expect to be able to enjoy their favorite ITV shows without interruption when they’re in Spain. After all virtually every show is broadcast live and archived on ITV Hub, their online TV station. Unfortunately access to the site is restricted to people in the United Kingdom and if you try to access from anywhere else including Spain then you’ll get a message like this –
What is ITV?
ITV is an acronym for “Independent Television”. ITV has been in existence since the 1950s. It is one of the oldest and most widely watched television channels in the world, with a variety of programming from dramas to comedy and reality television.What is ITV?
ITV Hub is an online video on demand service accessible through the main ITV website itv.com. The service offers a variety of programmes from homegrown programming to imports across ITV, ITV2, ITVBe, ITV3, ITV4 and CITV. Some sports programming is available to watch again via the service, the 2010 FIFA World Cup and highlights being examples. Some programmes, imports and movies are not currently available due to rights issues.
All of the channels are broadcast live and also available from their catch up service to watch later. Some of the apps on certain devices don’t support the live streaming, e.g. currently the ITV Hub app on Xbox will allow access to catch up but not live streaming.
Can You Watch live UK channels like ITV in Spain ?
There is only one real requirement to watch most of the UK television channels in places like Spain or Portugal and that’s a British IP address. Unfortunately it isn’t easy to get access to a UK IP address when you’re in Spain as whenever you connect to the internet you’ll be assigned a Spanish one! All the British TV channels use a technology called geo-blocking where they restrict access to anyone outside the UK. So as soon as you step outside the UK and connect to the internet none of the channels work – this includes BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, Channel 4 and all the other smaller channels.
Why Does ITV hub not work abroad?
Well for this exact reason, your IP address must be registered in the UK. If it doesn’t then ITV Hub won’t work.
Fortunately there is a solution, you can use something called a VPN service to hide your real IP address and substitute a UK based one instead. By using this ‘spoofed’ UK IP address you can use a VPN to unblock all UK TV stations including ITV Hub and BBC iPlayer. You used to also be able to do this using proxy sites however unfortunately they rarely work anymore in 2021.
There are some other options to access British TV using satellite or IPTV Networks however these are either too expensive or liable to be shut off without warning. Generally the millions who do watch ITV in Spain every day do so by using a VPN on their device.
Watch ITV in Spain with VPN
So you’re missing Love Island or getting want to know what’s happening in Coronation Street but your Spanish internet connection is blocked ! So what can you do, how do we get this geeky sounding VPN solutions working. Well don’t worry it’s not actually that difficult as long as you use the right VPN. There are quite a few available at a very low cost which are simple to install and get working on most devices.
In this video we’ll show you probably the most popular one called NordVPN – latest discount page available here.
As you can see it’s fairly simple and the same solution will work for all the different UK TV stations. So you do exactly the same to watch BBC iPlayer or Channel 4’s channel – ALL 4. It also will allow you to access other sites like Sky Go, Now TV and others. Remember though you still need a valid subscription for these even when using a VPN. The same applies to Netflix, when you connect using a UK VPN then you’ll get the British version of Netflix rather than the Spanish one.
Pick the Right VPN and Unlock Everything
Now in the good old days (I’m talking a few years back now) – you could basically grab any UK proxy or VPN and this would work. In fact if you just wanted to watch TV like British TV in Spain then even some of the free ones would work. Nowadays though in 2021, most of these media sites try and block this sort of access. They actively try and detect VPN connections and block them from working. There’s no fool proof way of doing this, rather an on-going battle to detect and filter IP connections made using UK based VPNs.
The bigger companies like the BBC and ITV have been quite successful though in this battle. Every free option is long gone, simply because they were way to easy to detect. Also though in 2022 you’ll actually find that many VPN services no longer bypass the geo-targeting blocks and won’t allow access especially to the BBC.
How Does ITV Hub Detect Spanish Users with British VPNs ?
There’s a few different ways and most of them revolve around detecting which IP address ranges are being assigned to UK VPN servers. This is why the free proxies stopped working years ago, as the IP addresses were easy to detect because so many people were using them. When you see twenty thousand people watching Coronation Street on the exact same UK IP address then it’s quite easy to work out it’s not from someone’s house.
This is why it actually takes quite a bit of work to keep your IP address working with these sites. The most important factor is to keep rotating the IP addresses and ensure that too many people don’t use the same ones to connect to the same sites.
So which ones still work ok in 2024?
Well it’s a combination of the bigger VPN companies who have committed to supporting access to these media sites (and have the support teams to deliver!). The biggest one which works with BBC iPlayer and ITV Hub in Spain is probably NordVPN.
The others are the higher price premium VPNs usually because they have less users on each IP address. If you don’t mind paying a little more something like Identity Cloaker (I used in Ireland last week) will work fine for all the major UK media sites from Spain.
Don’t get worried if you see lots of people shouting that VPNs no longer work for BBC or ITV Player, it’s not true. Lots have stopped working but there’s plenty that still work if you pick the right one. So if you want to know how to watch UK TV in Spain just give NordVPN a go, it has plenty of UK servers and you can install on most devices. We recommend you pick one of the servers below rather than use ‘auto-connect’ these are specifically designed to allow you to stream ITV and watch UK TV live from outside the UK.
UK# 1840-1847, 1850-1863, 1865, 1869, 1873, 1875-1878, 1880-1881, 1900-1901, 1903-1904, 1911, 1913, 1917, 1919-1920.
Please use these servers if you try NordVPN for watching British TV – they work much better than the other NordVPN ones for the telly !