Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: IPTV Service In the UK?
New submitter OlivierB writes "I am moving to a new house in the UK. The house will have very fast broadband but there is only one TV/cable aerial to plug into which is also very inconveniently located in the property. The cable TV provider can move it (for a high fee), but the biggest issue is that their channel packages are just too expensive and not appealing to me. Ideally, I would like access to the UK Freeview channels, and maybe a few extras such as Discovery Channel, Eurosport etc. All of this content would be available via IPTV, which I could watch from an HTPC or simple set-top boxes. Do you have any ideas to share with me?"
www.tvcatchup.com streams, I think, all Freeview channels as long as you access it from the UK with a UK ISP. HD for HD channels.
Doesn't work with AdBlock enabled.
Its legality is being challenged, unsuccessfully so far, according to wikipedia. As a side note, you're still supposed to pay for TV licence.
Get a FreeSat package, put up the dish and cabling, and ditch the receiver, and get an Elgato Netstream Sat from http://www.elgato.com/elgato/int/mainmenu/products/tuner/netstreamsat/product1.en.html
It'll do all the tuning, and basically takes a LNB on the input, and a network switch as the output. You pick your channels from the M3U playlist, and it does the rest - like magic. Works with MythTV, XBMC, VLC, etc. Fabulous kit
You don't specify if your TV point is an aerial or a cable installation. If it's a cable, you will need to play by their rules for that point.
In most cases, getting an aerial fitted isn't that expensive. When I moved into my current house, I had the old one totally removed and replaced and got a nice signal booster and six way splitter all professionally supplied and fitted for less than £100.
If you'd be happy with the Freeview channels, plug your aerial into a box running MythTV and then use a WLAN to get TV wherever you want in the house.
I'm not sure about yuor other mentioned channels.
If you have cable, it'll probably be Virgin Media. That means that they'll hike your prices at least annually by at least 10%, without warning. (They like doing that). I personally wouldn't use them for anything more than a simple cable modem. Source your TV content elsewhere. Really, running an antenna downlead to a useful place is easy, it will also mean you don't have to rely on internet working to watch telly that is being broadcast anyway. Get yourself a PVR, set it to record what you like. You'll soon find that you have plenty of interesting TV to keep you amused and occupied without having to pay for any additional premium channels. When you run out of stuff to watch, go outside and take the dog for a walk. If you don't have a dog, borrow someone else's. If you don't like dogs, go for a walk yourself. If you don't like walking, go for a bike ride... get the idea?
Take a look at filmon.com, they stream all of the free to air channels as well as a few others. The SD feed is ok quality for free, or they have a subscription service for a HD stream. I think that it is a legal service, they have some information about paying channel providers on their website, but they have been sued before and there might be one case still pending.
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
I have Virgin Media's basic TV package as it's more expensive to not have TV at all. Also, what's wrong with putting up an antenna and freeview tuners? Or even extending/moving the cable yourself? Coax termination isn't exactly hard.
http://www.youview.com/
Get a cheap satellite system with a stand and set the dish up 'temporarily' in the garden. You can also get special flat cables from Maplin that allows you to bring cable in via a window without need to drill. This should also prevent any hassle with the landlord.
Sorry shouldn't be reading Slashdot it's a US site
I have one at my house (US). It's about the size of a pack of cards, and has two ports. The TV Cable goes into the first, your home internet into the second. You can then watch unscrambled TV anywhere on your network. Under Linux, use MythTV or a combination of VLC and SiliconDust's own apps. I bought the cheapest version, about $80, which is limited to unscambled stations and two stations simultaneously. I get about 6 stations.
There's also a version whch accepts a card from the Cable provider which will unscramble the signal and provides three stations simultaneously.
The UK has a lot free to air and free to view channels.
There are quite a few devices that have multiple TV tuners and encode / stream the TV over your LAN / WLAN. I've got a Hauppauge one somewhere which works well (although must remember to ebay it soon now I've re-wired my house). There are plenty of options available.
Personally I'd do a bit of DIY and put an aerial splitter in the roof and drop a few more cables in. Much better solution long term, DIY really isn't that hard...
Keep a check on http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange_mapping to see how far you are from the infrastructure. If you are using copper wires they talk about fast, and you are more than a few km from the exchange, somebody is lying!
Get a VPN and then subscribe to USA netflix.
Ask a friend for an invite to a private TV tracker with an RSS feed.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
If the landlord will allow a dish install, they're reasonably priced (£25pcm for all channels, excluding movies and sports), and can also provide your landline + broadband/fibre. We pay ~£70pcm for Sky, Movies, landline, and 40mb fibre (which has no download caps or traffic shaping).
Alternatively, you can pull out all the indoor Virgin Media cables (assuming they've haphazardly tacked them to the skirting boards) to the outside of the property (where they should be joined with a threaded 'F' barrel coupler), and they'll have to run them to where you want them during the install. However, their TV packages are somewhat confusing, generally more expensive than the Sky equivalent, and they'll charge more for the subscription if you don't take a phoneline as part of the deal.
Failing that, buy a 20m aerial extension kit and a Freeview HD box from Amazon, and pray that you get a good signal.
Freesat is the way to go. I have a turbosight TBS6984 quad s2 sat tv card in a mythbackend, then various frontends dotted round the house.
We can pick up all of the usual uk channels off the astra (sky) sat where they're not encrypted, and it won't jam up your pipe with data.
I have one quad lnb equipped 60cm satelite with sat cable down to the rack where the backend lives. The rest of the property has no antenna cabling at all. For dedicated frontends I prefer hardwire cat5 connected htpc's as some of the consumer grade wifi is a bit crap under sustained data throughput, although with the last android mythfrontend update we can now watch sd quality streams smoothly on various tablets and phones (my defy, my wife's nexus, our two crappy archos tablets and my son's chinese 50 quid special no name tablet), so for those times when you want to watch tv on the bog, we even have that covered. You'll need some power in your front ends to stream the HD channels at full quality though, but as even my games room projector is a old analog barco I've never really felt the need to display individual pixels on a cheetah's bum on some wildlife program.
Interestingly we're in France, visiting relatives are often freaked out at the kids watching a laptop playing cbeebies in the garden or me listening to radio1's stream while cutting the grass etc. Been doing mythtv for YEARS now... Great software.
Future plans are a second dish for another satelite, and a second quad tuner card to match... And that 3tb drive is starting to look full again with all the "justins house" and "cbeebies christmas panto's " that have accumulated on it..
I don't think there's any parcticular need for a special package if you already have fast broadband. Most of the decent free TV is on iPlayer, which covers all the BBC channels and now has content from the major free to view commercial rivals:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/
You might also want to check out the ITV Player, 4od and Demand 5 sites (I rarely bother).
You can grab BBC (only) programmes from iPlayer with get_iplayer, which generates standard mp4 files you can play anywhere (finally a use for that Apple TV!):
http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html
Some US TV sites can be accessed by methods like this (or get a VPN):
http://xtremisreaction.wordpress.com/2011/01/08/how-to-watch-the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-in-the-uk/
http://xtremisreaction.wordpress.com/2013/01/05/how-to-watch-hulu-and-us-television-in-the-uk/
You can still go Satellite without paying the Murdoch tax.
Install a motorised dish at £300 buy a DVB-S STB at anything from the Eagle-HD at £60 to the Dreambox DM800 £400 depending on features required.
You will get all FreeSat channels plus literally thousands of overseas channels and more with software cams.
These are both Internet enabled and can view BBC iPlayer, YouTube, etc and support CAS emulation.
I have a setup with a satellite dish, Freesat box (Technisat HDFS, which is also a PVR if you add a USB HDD) which has a network adapter. iPlayer works via broadband for catchup TV, the rest is all just PVR. Virgin have a Tivo like box for cable, but you'll pay heavy subscription fees for that.
Freesat gets you most of what you need. For Video on Demand Netflix runs in the UK, selection not as good as US, you can as others have suggested get a VPN as needed to look like you're in the US.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
free online freeview provider: http://tvcatchup.com/
then the major channels all offer online services to watch their shows.
Most decent modern TVs have a freeview tuner built and iplayer (for the BBC) plus there are Freeview boxes that act as DVR's
Mid-range TVs do all of this now, or you can point your webbrowser to any of the main tv providers.
Only thing to watch for is with the TVs, some of them take the piss with pricing on their proprietary USB wifi.
Moving a TV aerial should be a fairly straightforward DIY task unless you're renting, though you should be able to get someone in to do it for you quite cheaply and they should align your aerial for you too. If you still get a crappy reception, look into Freesat.
You could get the DVB-T version of the HD Homerun and hook that up to the inconveniently placed aerial and then stream Freeview over your network, either direct to a device or to a MythTV box. One thing to note is that as it's only capable of DVB-T reception it doesn't actually get any of the Freeview HD channels.
At some point, somewhere, the entire internet will be found to be illegal.
In the UK, in spite of what they tell you, you are on a (relatively) small island with 60+ million people! The UK government went digital TV quite a few years ago, and (better yet and unlike in North America) got quite insistent that all the over-the-air TV broadcasters in a given area must share an antenna. Result: instead of having two, three or four antennas all pointed at different towers, then ganged together (remember when ganging antennas together, the gain on any antenna is divided by the number of antennas, because the signal re-radiates through the lot). Result: in the UK, one high gain antenna, highly directional and very efficient, pointed in a single direction, will get you all of the channels in a given area. Because of the large number of eyeballs in a given area (remember what I said about 60+ million people on a small island), there are a large number of free, over-the-air channels, all in high definition digital. Unlike in North America, there are licence fees to watch tv. (That's the downside).
XBMC is working well for me here.. got an 8TB media server serving up all my archived DVD's and BluRays, hooked up to my sound system. Then in each room a raspberry pi running XBMC attached to homeplugs (too lazy to cable my flat). Set them up to use the SQL xmbc library, and add the TVcatchup to each. You will then have access to any media you have, and all uk SD channels without any cabling at all. and when you get bored you have a few raspberry pi s to experiment with.