Watch UK/US TV Abroard – The 2011 Beginners Guide

I first wrote this guide over at my personal blog. It got picked up by Lifehacker and is in the Stumbleupon archives, so it still gets a fair bit of traffic. I’d been threatening to update it for some time and, with the new Geekosity site I figured that now was the time to do it. So if you arrived here afresh or were redirected from my blog, welcome.

When this guide was first produced three years ago, there were far fewer opportunities for the homesick expat or traveller to view TV from home. Since then, as broadband speeds have grown ever more capacious, so have the options. Enterprising companies have started branding themselves directly in order to attract these customers and existing suppliers have produced special products. All that being said, the general thrust of this article hasn’t changed. The bottom line is that if you want to watch TV from another country, it’s far more convenient to simply download it and watch it later than it is to attempt to view either live or via a specialist country-specific player application such as iPlayer or Hulu.

Authors note: I live in Australia and my principle interest is in viewing UK television and the better American output, however many of the topics discussed below apply equally whether you’ve living in Perth or Panama.

Update 12/10/11 – If you’re looking for a quick and simple automated TV show downloader, check out this tutorial I just added to the site.

Broadcast

Before you dismiss your new country’s televisual offerings out-of-hand, have a good look at the schedules. Depending on where you are you’ll probably find a great deal of UK and American TV. Here in Australia the national broadcaster (ABC) is virtually a British TV channel on some nights of the week. Moreover the national 24 hour news channel (again, ABC) broadcast an hour of news from the BBC in the small hours of the morning. Invest in a decent media centre or a satellite PVR (either Foxtel IQ or MyStar here in Oz) and you can record these programmes broadcast at exotic times of the night.

Satellite TV

Satellite broadcasters weren’t slow to capitalise on the foreign visitors market. On Australian satellite TV there are numerous UK channels, such as UKTV, Lifestyle and BBC Knowledge – I’m sure the situation’s similar in the USA. In fact there’s so much ‘homegrown’ telly on the satellite here that you may well find you don’t need to go any further afield to satisfy your cravings. What may force your hand is the age of the programmes being broadcast, soap operas broadcast on satellite here are famously behind the UK.

Internet

Far and away the cheapest and easiest way of getting your fix of British TV is to download it. Yes it’s illegal and yes everyone’s doing it – but if you’re the nervous type I’d still stick to satellite TV.

The Software

Without doubt, the best way of infesting your PC with spyware and viruses, is to download bent software, movies or music. But then you probably already knew that, right? It’s a bit like smoking – many of us are prepared to take the risk. Unlike smoking, however, you can cut down on your chances of contracting something undesirable by staying away from the dodgier download sites. Get a decent antivirus and antispyware package on your PC and instead get your pirated TV shows and movies from torrent sites.

To download you need a torrent program such as uTorrent on the PC or Transmission on the Mac. Install them. Nurture them. Love them. Here endeth the ‘which downloader program is best’ section.

In order to watch your shows once they’ve downloaded, you’ll need a decent media player of some sort. The one I’d recommend is VLC Media Player which is cross platform. Alternatively, combine your torrent downloading with a very capable viewer and use Miro. If you have a media centre then get Boxee if you’re on a PC or Plex if you’re on a Mac.

If you want to watch TV shows on your TV then you’ll need a DVD player that can playback DivX and/or Xvid files – it’ll probably say on the front of the player if it can. If your DVD player does support DivX then just burn your downloaded TV shows onto a DVD in data format (just as you would with a backup) and bung the disc in the player. If your DVD player does not support DivX or Xvid then you’ll have to convert the downloaded files into full DVD format for which you’ll need something like ConvertXtoDVD.

Generally speaking you’re supposed to share as much as you download – so if you’ve downloaded at 500Mb TV show, you’re supposed to let uTorrent upload 500Mb too. However. It’s only the sites you have to register for (such as TheBox) that you have to care about that for. If you download from BTJunkie you can stop the file uploading as soon as you’ve finished its download. It’s called doing a hit and run and it’s not the done thing to do, but fuck it.

Once a file’s finished downloading (and if you’ve uploaded as much as you want to in order to keep your ratio high at sites like The Box), you can click on its name in the main uTorrent window and hit the delete key to remove it. This will not delete the actual TV show or whatever, just the torrent details from within uTorrent. As long as a file remains in that main uTorrent window it will continue ‘seeding’. If you let it, uTorrent will use *all* your upstream bandwidth, which can make things very slow for web browsing and the like – so you can either limit it, or just leave it going overnight (which is what I do). If you want to limit the upload speed, so you can browse the web etc without slow-downs, open uTorrent and go to Options > Preferences > Connection … and in the bottom right where it says ‘Global maximum upload rate’ set it to 10. This won’t harm the speed things download at – just the amount of upstream bandwidth you donate to sharing the files.

The Sites

There are zillions of torrent sites, but just two are exclusively devoted to all things UK – they being UK Nova (the original British TV torrent site) and The Box (the new kid on the block). For more general TV downloads I can recommend BTJunkie and Demonoid.

Now the thing to bear in mind with sites like UK Nova and The Box is that the people that run them have a rather inflated sense of their self worth. They seem to have forgotten the fact that they’re helping to peddle pirated copyrighted media and instead think they’re great big throbbing cocks of love. The truth is halfway between the two. Anyway – the specialist torrent sites take things very personally when you simply download what you want as quickly as possible and then stop – it’s the online equivalent of fucking the vicar’s daughter and then wiping your knob on the living room curtains. It’s also pretty difficult to register on either of the aforementioned sites and so you’d be spiteing yourself if you didn’t share as much as you snag. Personally I find all that ‘upload as much you download’ business so draining that I go out of my way to download anywhere but UK Nova and The Box.

Direct from the Source

As you may or may not be aware, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have made many of their programmes available online. They’ve all followed pretty much the same model – some things are available for just 7 days after they air on TV – others can be downloaded whenever. They usually come equipped with nasty DRM (digital rights management) that means that a) you can’t watch them anywhere but blighty and b) seven days after you’ve watched them, they self-destruct like a cheesy Mission Improbable prop.

To make matters worse, the BBC (in particular) employ some very effective geographical IP scanning, which means that unless you are physically located in the UK at the time of download – you can’t watch nuffink. Guv.

The Great Escape

Remember the film The Great Escape which depicted the real life escape by allied troops during WWII from Stalag Luft III. They tried various ways to get out of the prison camp, but the most effective was a tunnel. And it’s a tunnel that you can use to access the British TV establishment’s finest programming. To be more precise, you can use a VPN Tunnel. Your IP address will cease to be Australian (or American or whatever) based and become a UK one. When you want to watch or download something from iPlayer or Hulu, you just connect the VPN tunnel and start downloading. It really is that simple.

You can find the BBC’s iPlayer here, ITV Catchup here and Channel 4 on Demand, here. Fill your boots.

Some people have had success using a proxy based software/subscription service called HideMyIP. The software costs $29.95 and then you’ll need to pay $7 a month for the premium subscription service to get yourself a useable UK based IP. If anyone’s actually used this service and can both stream and download from BBC iPlayer – please let me know.

The current favourite amongst homesick telly addicts, however, is Expat Shield. This uses a simple proxy to fool the foreign servers into thinking you’re in Birmingham and not Barcellona. Even more amazingly, Expat Shield is completely free. The only problem I have with it is that whenever I’ve tried to use it, it’s been chronically slow. However I know plenty of people who swear by it – so give it a go – you’ve got nothing to lose. Oh and unfortunately, it’s Windows only at this time.

I recently stumbled upon a new cool (and free) VPN service that worked really for me. It’s called TunnelBear and comes in both Windows and Mac flavours. For free you get 500Mb of bandwidth to play with, which is useful for testing the service out. If you decide it’s working really well for you then the full service is a very reasonable $4.99 a month. We had really good results with this VPN watching BBC iPlayer from Australia – and if that works well (given the 12,000 miles between me and the server) you can be pretty sure that everything else will.

I recently gave Unblock-us.com a roadtest, using the company’s 7 day trial period to view BBC iPlayer in the UK and Hulu in the states. While Hulu playback was fine from here in Australia, the iPlayer wasn’t – it buffered endlessly and after bumping the video quality down to dialup grade, it ground to a halt. Your mileage may well vary depending on where on the planet you are and what size pipe your modem’s plugged into.

Current VPN Recommendation

I get a lot of emails from people asking me to recommend a VPN provider. So far I’ve either paid for or been given trial accounts to pretty much all of them. I’m currently a paid subscriber at Strong. They’re the biggest and the best of the VPN companies and while their service is not without its faults, it works well.

Even on something like a Strong VPN connection, you’re not going to be able to watch ‘live’ on the iPlayer at the hi-def streams from somewhere like Australia, but it’s still very watchable at the lower end. If you’re closer to the UK than me  you’ll see marked improvements of course.

The main issue I have with Strong is that switching servers is a pain in the arse. On other VPN services I’ve used, you simply set up a couple of concurrent VPN accounts and join the one that’s appropriate to your viewing requirements. However if I set up a UK based VPN on Strong and then want to change to an American server to watch Hulu, I have to log into their control panel, select a new server and then enter a new username and password. It’s a silly setup, but since I hardly bother with Hulu these days, I just leave my UK connection active.

Alternatives

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again – watching geo-locked content via a proxy, a DNS server or a VPN is a pretty futile exercise. In my opinion it’s far better to simply sign up to one of the better Newsgroup providers (like Astraweb) and download your shows automatically in 1080p. If you use a server based download application like SabNZB and get an account at nzbmatrix.com or newzbin.com then you can set up simple search expressions to download your shows as soon as they become available.

Live Streaming Video

Just checked out a commercial live TV streaming service and was impressed. I’ve put together a short video review of it, including footage of the video streaming, so you can gauge for yourself if it’s something you’d pay money for.