ITVX Not Working with VPN?

With many of us still stuck at home, online streaming services have become increasingly important.  Until we’re allowed out to do other things, sites like Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Prime are  a welcome distraction from the pandemic.

Using all these paid subscription services can get expensive though and it’s all to easy for ‘Netflix fatigue’ to set in.  Many of us have flicked through the enormous catalogues of these online sites and struggled to find something to watch.   Which is why the terrestrial TV stations who stream online offer an amazing alternative! Many have live streaming programmes plus great archives. Free sites like ITV Hub and BBC iPlayer often have more watchable content than the expensive paid media sites.

In the UK alone there are several TV broadcasters who put their content online, with the BBC and ITV being the biggest by far.  The only drawback is that they are restricted to UK residents, if you’re located outside the UK then you’ll get blocked.  There is a solution of course, by using a VPN service you can watch all the British TV from anywhere in the world by using a UK based VPN.

The concept is simple, you connect to a VPN server which hides your data and your location.   The target website will only see the location of the VPN server – so if it’s in the UK then you’ll have access to all UK only websites while connected.

It’s so straight forward that millions have done it for years, the VPN services have become simple to use and cost very little.  A few pounds for a VPN will unlock thousands of TV shows broadcast live and recorded.  The BBC will even let you download shows to watch offline including Match of the Day !  Unfortunately the broadcasters do try and stop this workaround, implementing different methods to stop the VPNs working.

Why ITV Hub is Not Working with ExpressVPN in 2023?

There are several methods that all of these online media sites use to block access to VPN connections.   Although actually physically detecting the presence of a VPN is extremely difficult, there are several clues that the companies can use to make a pretty good guess.   Over the years several methods have been used by both the public and commercial broadcasters yet they have found the simplest methods are nearly always the most effective.

For much of last year and the beginning of 2021 for example one of the most popular VPN services – ExpressVPN has stopped working with ITV Hub and became fairly unreliable with BBC iPlayer.  To be fair they weren’t the only ones with many VPN services seemingly stopping working altogether with these sites.

So what happened with Express VPN, why did loads of users simply get blocked when they tried to access their favorite shows?  Well it’s because both of these media companies started using a method that was both logical and simple to implement – they looked for concurrent connections.

When an ordinary UK user connects to BBC iPlayer to watch the news or to ITV Hub for Coronation Street, they use their standard IP address. It’s unlikely anyone else will use this address, except if they share their connection with others.  So even if the internet account is shared there will be at most a handful of connections using the same address.

Compare this to an ExpressVPN Connection where literally thousands of users will be sharing the same IP address through a VPN server.  It’s very obvious that an IP address streaming thousands of  different connections will be coming from either a VPN or proxy server.  Then all they have to do is blacklist or block this address and all the VPN users connected through that IP address won’t be able to connect.  This can even be done automatically, blocking any address when a certain threshold is reached.

So Which VPNS Do Work with ITV Hub and BBC iPlayer ?

This is the 64 million dollar question and one that you’ll hear a lot of different answers to online.  Firstly nearly every VPN provider will insist that their VPN services does allow access to both ITVX and BBC iPlayer even if it doesn’t.  Their reasoning is that the worst that will happen is that you’ll ask for a refund if you find out it doesn’t.  Some genuinely have given up all attempts at trying to maintain access and others will do their very best.  There can be no 100% guarantee though as it requires a lot of work to keep your VPN working especially when the media sites are being aggressive in blocking access.

There’s three main groups of VPN which do still work with ITV Hub and BBC iPlayer, although there is some overlap between them.

• VPN Services which attempts to rotate IP addresses and monitor the number of concurrent connections to these media site to avoid bans.
• VPNs with less users per server IP actively using ITV Hub and BBC iPlayer which are largely unaffected by these blocks.
• VPN services which offer dedicated IP addresses (i.e. not shared)

You will very rarely find a VPN service where every single IP address works every single time, it’s just too difficult and costly to maintain these ratios.  However many services do ensure a significant proportion of their IP addresses are unblocked.  Out of the low cost VPN providers, Nord VPN provides the most reliable service as long as you use the servers that they specifically monitor for access to UK Television sites.

These are the servers that NordVPN optimize for BBC iPlayer access, they seem to work best for ITV Hub too – UK# 1840-1847, 1850-1863, 1865, 1869, 1873, 1875-1878, 1880-1881, 1900-1901, 1903-1904, 1911, 1913, 1917, 1919-1920.  If you do pick NordVPN never use the ‘auto connect’ feature as these servers rarely work as too many people are using them.

The other VPN which in my experience always works with ITV Hub and BBC iPlayer is called Identity Cloaker.  The reasons are simple, they do try and maintain a low user/server ratio especially on their UK servers.  Plus they’re nowhere near the size of something like ExpressVPN and just don’t have as many users connecting to these popular media sites.  The drawback with Identity Cloaker is that it costs a little more and only has specific software for the PC and MAC – you have to install manually on phones and tablets.  It is very reliable though and works all the time with ITV Hub and BBC.