How to Watch Live British TV in the US or Anywhere
When travelling to the US whether with work or my family for a holiday, boredom is never really an issue. Certainly in any areas of the US that caters for tourists there’s lots of things to do and usually at a very reasonable cost too with the possible exception of Florida theme parks. However the title of this post refers to something that for UK people at least is often missed – UK Television. For people from the UK such as expats , US television can be quite difficult to watch as we’re simply not used to the huge amount of advertising. The commercial broadcasters in the UK have much less ad time and of course the wonderful BBC has no advertising on any of it’s channels.
The internet briefly promised the ability of being able to take your domestic TV stations with you. However watching British TV online became harder when commercial greed took this away from us when all the media companies started to block access to domestic TV stations by using a technology called region locking. This is the method (used by almost all mainstream media companies) to detect your location and block access to anyone not connecting from the specified country, which means that you can’t watch UK TV online in the USA (or anywhere outside the UK) as it gets blocked.
Doesn’t really sound fair? Many would argue that it isn’t especially in the situation where a UK TV license payer is blocked from accessing the BBC iPlayer application simply because they happen to be in another country. Similar situations of course happen to US citizens who are blocked access from their domestic TV channels when travelling outside the US. Of course, this is the internet and money grabbing media companies rarely get their own way completely so there are options.
You Can Watch UK TV Online in USA
So fear not, you don’t have to be restricted and blocked when you try and watch your favorite TV stations online. The methods for bypassing these blocks have reduced in the last few years but it’s still perfectly possible to watch the BBC for example from the USA or any country in the world with an decent internet connection.
Just watch this brief video for an example using NordVPN.
As you can see initially the UK TV stations are blocked, however all you have to do is hide your IP address by connecting through a VPN server and you’ll be able to watch whatever you like. There are some caveats, firstly the server you connect through must be in the correct country. So for watching UK television you’ll obviously need to connect through a UK based servers. However most of the decent VPN services will have servers in lots of different countries which means this shouldn’t be a problem. The best ones are also fairly flexible meaning you can use them on other devices, you can watch UK TV abroad on iPad, Android and most media streamers.
Obviously the media firms are not overly impressed with this and some make an effort to try and block these workarounds. The level of effort they put in varies quite a lot though from half hearted attempts which stop virtually no-one to the extreme measures taken by Netflix which stop 95% of these services working. Most of the UK channels block a proportion of these services, however last year the BBC stepped up it’s attempts significantly. Until then the BBC was very laid back about users watching the BBC from abroad.
There are still services that work, both for the BBC and even to watch Sky Go abroad but always ensure you try a short trial before purchasing a longer subscription. The safest and most reliable are the VPN services which are security focused, anything which promotes TV watching or downloading illegal torrents will always end up being blocked.
Try out NordVPN and see how well it works if you want to watch UK TV in the USA.