So is it possible? Can you watch UK TV Channels abroad? The good news is yes, all the major UK TV stations broadcast online and can be accessed over the internet from anywhere in the world.
In fact, at this moment literally millions of connections are made to the UK online TV stations. They’re watching the BBC in Marbella, Channel 4 in Istanbul, expats from anywhere and you can watch ITV player abroad too.
Of course, it’s not quite that straight forward as you may have discovered if you’ve tried to watch British TV online. Let’s firstly list the major online TV stations:
- BBC iPlayer – the best online TV channels possibly in the world, with about ten online streaming channels live and thousands of hours content archived. For many of us – it’s all we watch!
- ITV Hub – UK’s premiere commercial TV station. Live streaming from all their channels and huge archive content although all of them have advertisements. New Box set section.
- All 4 – the innovative UK TV channel. Live streaming and archive section, with some brilliant box sets.
- My 5 – Channel 5’s online channel with live streaming and box sets from their own content and bought in from other channels. Some great dramas, crime and sci-fi programmes that you won’t find anywhere else.
- Sky Go – Sky is the biggest satellite broadcaster in the UK and has millions of subscribers. Loads of movies, films, TV series and documentaries. Plus usually has coverage of most major sporting events. You will need a paid subscription to watch Sky Go abroad and access these channels.
There are other stations of course, including the BBC and Virgins commercial channels but these are easily the most popular. The free options are usually enough for anyone with some of the world’s best English language content (although there’s many foreign language films and documentaries especially on Channel 4 too).
However here’s the catch, every single one of the above sites does a location check when you visit their sit. If you’re connecting from outside the United Kingdom, then you’ll be redirected to an apology and none of the streaming content will work.
How to Watch UK TV Channels Abroad
But please don’t give up, those few channels are worth fighting for with literally thousands of hours of fantastic TV – documentaries, drama, current affairs, comedies and movies just between the free to air channels.
All you need to do is hide your location and make it look like you’re in the UK. There is a simple way to do this by routing your connection through a server based in Britain. There used to be several options for this connection including using something called a proxy server however all these options are now blocked by the websites. The only method that cannot be detected is by using a VPN which is what we can see in the following video:
The video focuses on the ITV hub but in reality the same methods work for all the UK online channels including the BBC. The only difference is the Sky GO which you will need a valid Sky Subscription to work (or someone in the UK who will let you use their account).
That’s all there is to it, every time you want to watch any of the UK TV channels on your computer or laptop then just connect to one of the UK servers. Any decent VPN service should allow you to watch UK TV channels abroad. If you want to watch a TV channel from another country, I’m afraid they all do this country blocking stuff, then choose a server from that country.
If you want to watch on another device, then you can set up the VPN directly on your phone, tablet or Chromebook – it’s not hard. Most of the decent providers will send you a guide and it should only take a couple of minutes to set up manually.
There are quite a lot of these VPN services available but only a few that work reliably each time. The very cheap ones are mostly terrible because they get blocked all the time and overload their servers so that you’ll find the stream buffering all the time. Although if you can download some of the BBC programmes to watch later if that’s preferable.
Our choice is the wonderfully, fast, reliable and discrete .. They’ve been tweaking their video streaming for over a decade now and you won’t find a faster way to watch the BBC iPlayer anywhere in the world. However much depends on your physical location so it’s probably worth testing the trial account first.
Try it here IDC
