While I've been out of the country, British TV has gone all hi-tech. Cutting edge TV in Britain used to mean a colour cathode ray tube, and more recently there was the introduction of the Freeview boxes as we all went digital. Now Sky Plus boxes, and Virgin Cable boxes allow us to pause and rewind television, and BBC's iPlayer service and Channel 4's On Demand website let you go back 7 days or more to watch programmes that you might have missed.
There is no technological reason that the BBC iPlayer can't work from overseas, it's all down to the way that the BBC is funded. As a licence-payer funded institution, and as a business that makes its money from selling it's content overseas, the BBC has taken the correct decision not to make the iPlayer avaiable for anyone who is physically located overseas. So this means that you can't watch your beloved BBC when you're on holiday in Corfu, or if you're an expat living in Shanghai, Miami or Sydney. Oh well.
There is a way around it, however. And that is the use of proxies.
You see, the BBC don't actually know where you are in the world, other than what your computer tells them. On the internet, our computer has what is known as an IP address, which stands for Internet Protocol. This is a unique address, just like a telephone number, that tells all the other computers on the internet which computer is yours. The BBC uses some clever software that "Geo-locates", or tells them where you are physically. The trick is to use someone else's IP address to tell the BBC's software that you are in the UK.
Now I've personally had quite limited success with using UK-based Proxy servers. There's a bunch of them available for free, but as with anything free, they don't tend to be of the highest quality.
There are also Proxy services that you can pay for, and again, I've had limited success. It is a well known fact that expats living abroad are desperate for their British Television, and a fool and his money are soon parted. I'll leave it up to you to find the right proxy service, if there even is one.
