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How To Watch Internet TV Across International Borders
colinneagle writes "Living in the U.S., one of my greatest regrets is that I can't watch BBC video with iPlayer. If I were living in the U.K., I'd feel the same away about not being able to watch shows on Hulu. But, with a Web proxy or a virtual private network (VPN) and an IP address in a country where the content is available, you can watch these shows. Technically, it's easy to set your browser up to use a Web proxy or VPN software. With a Web proxy and Windows XP, for example, you just go to Internet Options, click the Connections tab, and then click LAN Settings. Next, under Proxy server you click to select the 'Use a proxy server for your LAN' check box. Finally, you enter the IP address of the proxy server and in the Port box, type the IP number that is used by the proxy server for client connections—that's usually 8080. It's usually pretty simple to do that in any browser and operating system. There are also programs, such as Proxy Switchy, for Chrome that makes it easy to switch from one proxy to another in a single session. When you use a proxy, though, all your traffic is still open to network administrators. If you want to visit another country and watch their TV in privacy, you'll need a VPN."
Really?
What slashdot reader is this written for?
A: Someone who doesn't know what a proxy is, or how to set one up?
B: Someone who isn't wise enough to google how to watch internet media that is region blocked?
D: Gnomes
C: Someone who accidentally stumbled onto slashdot today?
The answer is D! Because the others are all make-believe!
Here is my experience: Italy to the US
Next thing you know we'll have all the bullshit that goes along with ask.com and ehow.
Your mouse. How to move it left and right AND up and down on your screen.
Set up your over-the-air TV antenna close to the US border.
Oh wait, if you are like most Canadians, you probably do that already.
*cue rim-shot*
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Of course sometimes you can just set the X-Forwarded-For attribute in your browser to an IP address inside the country. A fair amount of web servers are set up to blindly trust it. A lot cheaper than a proxy when it works.
The last time I tried the problem was in the flash players/plugin making direct connections to content by ignoring the http_proxy settings of the browser. Setting the default route to the VPN made it work, long story short: proxy settings in browser might not be enough.
finding a decent open proxy. They go down all the time with no warning. So pay up and get a commercial account or be prepared to make open proxy hunting a part of your daily/weekly routine.
I used to play a MMRPG that banned my entire continent's IP... I still remember the feeling of joy upon finding a fast open proxy outside my banned zone!
Some people might find this useful, so let's not get too carried away with our technical superiority. If you don't find the story informative, don't read it.
It never ceases to amaze me how many people on messageboards will weight in on a topic that they're not interested in just to say "I'm not interested in this topic." On /. we seem to have people who do nothing but post inane comments about how they're not interested in a particular story, usually in the Idle section. I find it amusing because clicking two buttons to post a reply was an even bigger waste of their time than the few seconds they spent reading the summary.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
Personally I have a VPS in every country I want to get content from. I have a US VPSs, for Netflix, Pandora an whatever else. I have a UK VPS for BBC iPlayer, Channel4 and so on. Cheap as chips generally. I think my UK one cost $30 a year! Sell the service to my friends, and bingo I've made my money back, and I don't have to worry (too much) about some third party stealing all of my traffic
So tunnel all the traffic via ssh or something.
They will never know.
Do the proxying a layer below.
http://unblock-us.com/ is what I have been using. They have a free trial and the experience has been pain free. Long term cost would be $4.99 / mo
I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it just does! (Can someone chime in on how they do it without a VPN??)
$.02,
-TJJ
There are *a lot* of people, expats and otherwise, that would be absolutely fine with paying for some sort of international license for the BBC. I see this "you're stealing BBC" crap from Brits, but they are not giving an option to us and we're asking for it.
Dear Slashdot,
I've been doing exactly this for, oh, I dunno, 8 or 9 years. I even have several fellow /.ers as clients on my VPN/proxy/privacy service. Thank you, Soulskill, for this lovely little time capsule from 2004.
Stay tuned for our next story, where a young startup named Apple plans to change the world with a new kind of graphic calculator, tentatively called "Newton".
-Billco, Fnarg.com
Wouldn't this have been a better post if it included a list o open VPN and Proxy services for each country?
It all starts at 0
2 years ago I decided that I wanted to view stuff through the BBC's iPlayer, forgetting that most of the good stuff from the BBC makes it here, and what doesn't make it here tends to be the dregs. Anyway, I found an open proxy in the UK and was barely able to get video across it. That was just the starting point. From there I looked at all of the HTTP communications (with Live HTTP Headers) and using FoxyProxy was able to just have certain pieces of data going through the proxy. I narrowed it down to just a few small HTTP communications that were being checked for location, and just proxied those. I got good streaming video after that because the actual video was being served up by Akamai. I wound up being served BBC video content from a server in Arizona.
Given that BBC America has most of the better stuff from the BBC, I haven't bothered messing with that kind of thing in several years.
This kind of thing may not work now, but it's worth checking to see just how much data really does have to be proxied/vpned if you are doing that kind of thing.
Since I like to watch UK streaming tv, I signed up with a VPS provider who along with their US datacenters, has a datacenter in the UK, and added a UK VPS to my account, along with the two others I have in their Dallas DC. An install of OpenVPN and Squid on the Ubuntu 10.04 OS and I'm off to watching UK TV. So far, its worked perfectly. I'm loaning it currently to friends who are rabid Olympics fans. Oh and the good part? The VPS is an OpenVZ 512mb container, choice of all sorts of Linux distros, and with 300GB/mo transfer, 15GB of diskspace, and costs me a whopping $5.95/mo. The two I have in Dallas are also $5.95/mo. As soon as $$$ are a bit looser in my wallet, I'm planning on going with the $59.95/yr plan on the two Dallas slices... Google ThrustVPS.. Don't have any financial ties to them, just been a customer for nearly two years and very happy with their service...
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
Tax? i thought it was a licence fee, and you get iplayer access in UK irrespective of if you pay or not, and don't outsside the UK irrespective of if you pay or not.
Max.
Well, strictly speaking, nothing is "necessary", you always have to qualify with "necessary for X". E.g. Roads are necessary for driving cars, which in turn is necessary for disease, pollution and slavery, while Dr. Who is necessary to learn about sonic screwdrivers.
I pay my TV licence (ok TV tax) in the UK gladly.
The BBC is one of the few things I think we do well in the world - the journalism and news reporting is beyond world class - it's world beating. Impartial reporting, truly global coverage. That can be hard to believe sitting in England, but as soon as you spend long enough abroad to try any other country it makes you appreciate how good the Beeb really is. Just try any southern-mediterranean broadcaster, Chinese state television, Russian state television, Fox News in the US (ok extreme example, but the rest of the local and national US news is also worth taking a look at while you're visiting) and compare it with the Beeb. It's simply in a different class.
This may come across as slightly anti US-TV. It's not meant to be, but you've gotten me angry and ranting now. It is meant to be scornful of someone stealing content from my favourite broadcaster, and because I have paid for it: stealing from me. Now get off my lawn, persuade your native/adopted/temporarily-visiting country to get better television, and get a pro-piracy story off the front page of slashdot.
Are governments allowed to assess a tax (or fee) outside of their own territory?
Yes.
Long Answer:
The US routinely assess taxes on its citizens everywhere in the world (it is one of the only, if not the only, country to do this to its citizens). When I lived in the UK I had to file returns in both countries. Had I lived in Hong Kong or Switzerland, I would have had to pay the difference between their tax rate and the higher US tax rate to Uncle Sam.
As far a fees go, just about anyone who has applied for any kind of visa will be able to attest that governments routinely charge fees outside of their borders. Visit any US consolate abroad to apply for an immigration visa to the US, or any other country's consulate abroad for the same purpose.
So yes, governments can and do assess taxes AND fees outside of their borders. I think it would be perfectly fine for the BBC to sell their service to viewers abroad...except they probably made the mistake of buying some of their content from other studios, and are prevented from doing so by the usual "splinter the market" contractual clauses that stem from the same outdated mindset that has given us region encoded DVDs and Blurays.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
they are not giving an option to us and we're asking for it
The BBC lack international broadcast rights for much of their content.
The olympics is licenced to the BBC for UK broadcast and Internet distribution. It's licenced to someone else in North America. The BBC can't legally transmit it to America.
Similar constraints apply to almost all of the content they don't create in-house, and they create remarkably little these days.
Of the content they do create, international sales (e.g. Top Gear and the output from their Natural History unit) are a significant source of funding for the BBC and help keep the licence fee down.
There are *a lot* of people, expats and otherwise, that would be absolutely fine with paying for some sort of international license for the BBC.
This is why the BBC have a premium channel in the US. They still can't broadcast the Olympics on it.
People don't come to Slashdot for the stories. They're badly written, usually days behind the mainstream and other tech media and frequently misrepresent stuff.
People come to Slashdot for the comments.
I don't want to read comments from people too fucking stupid to use Google to work out how to set up a proxy. I don't expect regular readers of Slashdot to need to use Google to find out how to set up a proxy.
I don't understand why this story exists. I'm reading it for the comedy value, and so that I can help feed back to Slashdot admin that dumbing down the content on Slashdot will be a great way of killing the site.