[Twig]

Most of you have probably already done this. But we have been here 7 months now, and quite frankly I couldn't have done it without BBC iPlayer. Seriously. Not that I'm an avid Eastenders fan, but I love the BBC drama's and to be honest, they bring that little bit of extra joy each week :D

Anyway, I meant to do this ages ago but forgot, but for those of you not in the know, you cannot get BBC iPlayer abroad unless you have a UK proxy server, which you can buy online and pay for monthly (usually around £5 per month, lots of companies out there doing it, just google UK Proxy server)...worth every penny in my humble opinion.

Right, well that was my two-pence worth. Cheers all :nice1

[mikey and tor]

so how do you use a proxy server? I have been told that PC world in UK sell some sort of device so you can get iplayer and the itv stuff too. i will look into this a bit more.

[adacakes]

not that I am a telly addict, but I could not manage without my weekly hit of "The Tudors" -Jonathan Rhys Myers ( be still my beating heart ahhhhhh).

Go BBC i player:nice1

[Alan]

If it's not a live programme you're after, register at UKNova, trust me you won't regret it!!

[ellenmelon]

If it's not a live programme you're after, register at UKNova, trust me you won't regret it!!

What they said ^ :) Lucky we have no cap 1am-6am so we set our torrent for then.

[James 1077]

I use usenet for my downloading of UK and US telly. The best thing about it is that it is very fast (30 min tv show in 8 mins, film in about half an hour) - plus it doesn't upload like torrents so you aren't file sharing.

Costs are low too (but not free!).

[Duncan74]

Of course it is still illegal though and I'm sure that for the sake of the board then none of us would want to be seen to be condoning such behaviour for the sake of the board owner........

[James 1077]

Of course it is still illegal though and I'm sure that for the sake of the board then none of us would want to be seen to be condoning such behaviour for the sake of the board owner........

I only use it to find material that is no longer in copyright or never was in the first place! :uhoh ;)

To be honest I still haven't worked out what the difference is between recording something that is on TV to watch later and downloading something that you forgot to record when it was on TV to watch later. The former seems to be fine and the latter will bring the world's creative industries to their knees.

[Duncan74]

Quite, and I'm not questioning the morales of it all, jsut from experience elsewhere know that it's something to be careful of to stop the site owners getting into grief. In the context of the iPlayer then it's about regional rights, and also probably to do with teh fact that you've had to pay the TV license if you're UK based, but clearly not if you're in the NZ.

[ExitStageSouth]

To be honest I still haven't worked out what the difference is between recording something that is on TV to watch later and downloading something that you forgot to record when it was on TV to watch later. The former seems to be fine and the latter will bring the world's creative industries to their knees.

The difference is that recording from the TV still involves you going through a gatekeeper provider who has a business model around your use of their service. If you download via usenet or torrents there is no gatekeeper extracting money from your use of the content (via subscription, rental, advertising, licence fee... whatever) and so no trickle-down to the content creators either. Whether the activity is as devastating to the industry as they like to make out is still arguable but there is a definite possibility that revenue is being lost along the line.

Personally, I think it's just a case of the media providers catching up with reality. If there's no mechanism to pay for the content then people will switch to illegal methods. If Jose Bloggs lives in Spain and enjoys House M.D, he's going to get pretty annoyed on the 22nd of this month when all the American House fans are posting all over the internet about what happened in the season opener on the 21st and he can't watch it. Quite probably annoyed enough to swallow any twinges of conscience and load up his bittorrent client. At that point the media providers had better hope that he likes House enough to watch it again when it hits Spanish TV screens several weeks or months later.

[coppers]

I was wondering if - can I not set my laptop up on a friend/family internet connection in the U.K, take laptop to NZ, plug into phone(?) connection (or internet connection) and use as if I was in the U.K and watch BBci player?

[Duncan74]

No, the iplayer sees the ip address you're using at the time you download the content, and knows that outside the uk. It's the location of download not setting the account up.

[petri]

Check out http://www.filmon.com/

Just watching the Italian F1 race from BBC 1 right now. Plenty of channels available, not sure what is their business model but works for the moment. You can even skip the registration..

OS X and Windows client available.

[stu & amanda]

Wow, just watched the F1 on filmon - the bbc xtra tab.
Thanks a lot for the info!!!!!!!!!

[wellywally]

some background to filmon, interesting stuff:
http://www.techradar.com/news/internet/filmon-ceo-vod-is-a-disaster--612242

[nifta]

hmm, interesting. hadn't heard of filmon before.. sounds like one to keep an eye on!

[talisker]

I use www.adtelly.tv - it's 50 quid a year for the VPN service. It works pretty well, all I do is connect via the VPN whenever I want to watch anything and can then use iPlayer, Channel 4 OD etc exactly as in the UK. The performance is quite good although sometimes iPlayer will stop and start a little bit, but not enough to be really annoying. 4OD works perfectly.

[wellywally]

what sort of broadband package do you use talisker? Your monthly GB usage must be reasonably high..?

[talisker]

what sort of broadband package do you use talisker? Your monthly GB usage must be reasonably high..?

I'm on Vodafone - I think it's 20GB a month. The most I watch through iplayer is about 3-4 hours a month and I never get anywhere near my limit.