Watch UK TV

Whether you’re British yourself, or merely a distant admirer – you have to admit, for such a small country we punch way over our weight when it comes to television programmes. And if you live in the UK that’s all well and good – with digital free-to-air, hi-def digital satellite, cable, and Internet based services to choose from – you’re spoilt for choice. But what happens if you live overseas? I live in Australia and the homegrown TV output in this country is (being generous here) fucking shite. So what if you want to watch some quality British TV programmes? Since I live in Australia – this guide reflects that – but the sections on the Internet will apply equally to anyone wishing to watch UK programmes outside the UK. If you know all about torrents and stuff you can skip straight to the meaty section down the bottom.

Broadcast

Free-to-air TV

ABC is your friend. They show a good selection of British TV shows – mainly (though not exclusively) your more educational output. You can find Time Team, Big Cat Diary, Dalziel and Pasco and Grand Designs here – along with loads of kids shows from the BBC including Bob the Builder. In amongst programming so esoteric that The Late Review would approve, SBS air shows like Top Gear, Shameless and Skins. The other channels (Prime, Win and Ten) show the odd UK programme (The Good Life, Vicar of Dibley, Ramsays Kitchen Nightmares and Doctor Who) but they force endless fucking advertising breaks on you and so really can’t be recommended for anyone but the truly desperate. If you do want to watch one of the few decent shows that Ten have on offer then a far better bet is to watch them online (Bondi Rescue‘s definitely worth a look).

Satellite TV
Sign up with Foxtel or Austar (they’re pretty much identical) and you’ll immediately get access to loads of British TV. Most obviously, there’s the UKTV channel, which airs shows like Coronation Street, Eastenders, Friday Night Project, Inspector Lynley, Parkinson, Little Britian, Last of the Summer Wine, My Family and The Worst Week of My Life. Meanwhile on the Lifestyle, How To and Lifestyle Food you can positively gorge yourself on the sort of piss-cheap daytime TV programmes that the Beeb and ITV churn out by the thousand. Cash in the Attic, Can’t Cook Won’t Cook, Relocation Relocation, Build a New Life, Bargain Hunt, Dickinson’s Real Deal and You Are What You Eat … they’re all on there. And if you hanker for something a bit more educational, the Nat Geo, Discovery and History channels show loads of British documentaries including Long Way Down, Pole to Pole, Earth, Blue Planet and I Was Hitler’s Nail Technician.

Internet

Downloads

Far and away the cheapest and easiset way of getting your fix of British TV is to download it. Yes it’s illegal and yes everyone’s doing it -  but if you’re the nervous type I’d still stick to satellite TV.

The Software

Without doubt, the best way of infesting your PC with spyware and viruses, is to download bent software, movies or music. But then you probably already knew that, right? It’s a bit like smoking – many of us are prepared to take the risk. Unlike smoking, however, you can cut down on your chances of contracting something undesirable by following these three simple steps. Step1) Do not use Limewire. Step 2) Do not use Limewire. Step 3) Do not use Limewire.Get a decent antivirus and antispyware package on your PC (I use Avast and Spy-Bot) and instead get your pirated TV shows and movies from torrent sites.

Torrents are not guaranteed free of viruses, but it does seem to me that  you stand way less chance of finding an embedded trojan or two in a torrent from a good site than you do from Limewire or eDonkey. This is partly because you can make use of the comments page on torrent sites and find out from people who’ve downloaded before you whether you’re getting Big Trouble in Little China or Big Trouble in the Computer Repair Shop.

Where were we? Oh yea, torrents are like a great big pot of virtual spaghetti. Files are split into little chunks of alphabetti spaghetti by the software and you might get one bit from a bloke in France, one bit from a bloke in America and so on. But all of that stuff happens in the background and is invisible to you. To download you need a torrent program – a bit of software that orchestrates all the different pieces, assembles the spaghetti into a TV show for you and deposits it in the directory of your choosing. With a nice chilli tomato sauce. Am I over-doing the spaghetti analogy?

The best torrent downloader is uTorrent, which you can get here. Install it. Nurture it. Love it. Here endeth the ‘which downloader program is best’ section.

In order to watch your shows once they’ve downloaded, you’ll need a decent media player of some sort. The ones I’d recommend are VLC Media Player and GOM Media Player. If you want to watch TV shows on your TV then you’ll need a DVD player that can playback DivX and/or Xvid files – it’ll probably say on the front of the player if it can. If your DVD player does support DivX then just burn your downloaded TV shows onto a DVD in data format (just as you would with a backup) and bung the disc in the player. If your DVD player does not support DivX or Xvid then you’ll have to convert the downloaded files into full DVD format for which you’ll need something like ConvertXtoDVD.

The Process

The speed that torrents download depends mainly on how many people are sharing the file. If only three people are sharing it’ll take a while – if more than 100 are, it’ll be fairly quick. It won’t download at one uniform speed either – they normally start off really slowly and then gather pace. Obviously the speed of your internet connection has some bearing ont things too.

You can monitor the download in the main uTorrent window. If you look at that window you’ll see two columns – one’s named ‘Seeds’ and one is ‘Peers’. Seeds are people who have downloaded the whole file and are simply sharing – Peers are people who are still downloading, but are also sharing.

Generally speaking you’re supposed to share as much as you download – so if you’ve downloaded at 500Mb TV show, you’re supposed to let uTorrent upload 500Mb too. However. It’s only the sites you have to register for (such as TheBox) that you have to care about that for. If you download from Mininova you can stop the file uploading as soon as you’ve finished its download. It’s called doing a hit and run and it’s not the done thing to do, but fuck it – bandwidth is precious here in Oz – let the fat fucking yanks bankroll us like they do the war on terror. Anyway.

Once a file’s finished downloading (and if you’ve uploaded as much as you want to in order to keep your ratio high at sites like The Box), you can click on its name in the main uTorrent window and hit the delete key to remove it. This will not delete the actual TV show or whatever, just the torrent details from within uTorrent. As long as a file remains in that main uTorrent window it will continue ‘seeding’. If you let it, uTorrent will use *all* your upstream bandwidth, which can make things very slow for web browsing and the like – so you can either limit it, or just leave it going overnight (which is what I do). If you want to limit the upload speed, so you can browse the web etc without slow-downs, open uTorrent and go to Options > Preferences > Connection … and in the bottom right where it says ‘Global maximum upload rate’ set it to 10. This won’t harm the speed things download at – just the amount of upstream bandwidth you donate to sharing the files.

The Sites

There are zillions of torrent sites, but just two are exclusively devoted to all things UK – they being UK Nova (the original British TV torrent site) and The Box (the new kid on the block).You can also find UK TV shows on sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay.

Now the thing to bear in mind with sites like UK Nova and The Box is that the people that run them have a rather inflated sense of their self worth. They seem to have forgotten the fact that they’re helping to peddle pirated copyrighted media and instead think they’re great big throbbing cocks of love. The truth is halfway between the two. Anyway – the specialist torrent sites take things very personally when you simply download what you want as quickly as possible and then stop – it’s the online equivalent of fucking the vicar’s daughter and then wiping your knob on his curtains. It’s also pretty difficult to register on either of the aforementioned sites and so you’d be spiteing yourself if you didn’t share as much as you snag. Personally I find all that ‘upload as much you download’ business so draining that I go out of my way to download anywhere but UK Nova and The Box.

Direct from the Source

As you may or may not be aware, the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 have made many of their programmes available online. They’ve all followed pretty much the same model – some things are available for just 7 days after they air on TV – others can be downloaded whenever. They all come fully equipped with nasty DRM (digital rights management) that means that a) you can’t watch them anywhere but blighty and b) seven days after you’ve watched them, they self-destruct like a cheesy Mission Improbable prop.

To make matters worse, the BBC (in particular) employ some very effective geographical IP scanning, which means that unless you are physically located in the UK at the time of download – you can’t watch nuffink. Guv. Believe me when I tell you that I’ve tried all sorts of things to circumvent this IP detection, including the usual line of attack – a proxy. However up until recently there was nothing I’d found that could beat it. However I have since discovered a way of side-stepping the BBC’s, ITV’s and Channel 4′s geo-IP detection systems. I have also found a fool-proof way of stripping all that nasty DRM off a file meaning you can keep ‘em for as long as you want or burn them to DVD to watch at your leisure on your fine looking 42″ plasma telly. The only downside to all this is that you are, unfortunately, going to have to spend a little bit of cash.

The Great Escape

Remember the film The Great Escape which depicted the real life escape by allied troops during WWII from Stalag Luft III. They tried various ways to get out of the prison camp, but the most effective was a tunnel. And it’s a tunnel that we’re going to use to access the British TV establishment’s finest programming. To be more precise, we’re going to use a VPN Tunnel. This VPN tunnel enables you to appear to be in the UK in a way that a proxy never could.

Your IP address will cease to be Australian (or American or whatever) based and become a UK one. When you want to watch or download something from iPlayer, you just connect the VPN tunnel and start downloading. It really is that simple. Here’s an extra top-tip however – you don’t have to stay connected to the VPN tunnel to download your shows – you only have to be connected when you start it. So to get the best speed, start the downloads going with the tunnel connected, then disconnect once you’ve got a couple of Kb down and your normal broadband connnection will kick in and take care of the rest.

You can find the BBC’s iPlayer here, ITV Catchup here and Channel 4 on Demand, here. Fill your boots.

I’ve also been told that some people have had success using a proxy based software/subscription service called HideMyIP. The software costs $29.95 and then you’ll need to pay $7 a month for the premium subscription service to get yourself a useable UK based IP. If anyone’s actually used this service and can both stream and download from BBC iPlayer – please let me know.

DRM be damned

In order to get rid of the DRM you’ll need some more software. Now there are various free DRM removal programs and you may have some success with them. However I didn’t find any that worked because I’d installed Media Player 11, or had the wrong codec or whatever. It’s a lot of ball-ache. So I splurged the grand total of $40 on a bit of commercial software that does the job perfectly with no pissing about whatsoever. The program in question is called Digital Media Converter Pro and you can download a trial and/or buy it here. It has the added advantage of enabling you to resize the converted de-DRM’d file so that you can play it back on your phone or your iPod or your TV.

So combine Media Converter Pro with VPN Tunnel and you can download anything you like from the British TV channels online services, remove the DRM code and burn them to DVD to watch wherever you want.

Watching UK television – live!
Right then my little British televsion watching chums – I have an update for you. It would seem that we have finally cracked the holy grail of UK telly watching from abroad – watching it live. Yep, that’s right – BBC1, BBC2, BBC3, BBC4, ITV, CH4, CH5, even CBeebies. Here’s how.

Firstly, you’re going to need an account with one of our VPN friends, as detailed above. Right, the next thing you’re going to need is a bit of software called Zattoo. Now – before you go charging off to download it – please be aware that they’ll do a regional IP check on you before you even get the software. So, in order to even download it and sign up, you’ll need to appear to be coming from a UK IP address. So either fire up your VPN tunnel or your Hide My IP software and then go to the webpage. If you try and download/sign up from somewhere like Australia, you’ll be given nothing but a sign-up form to be notified when the service is available here.

Okay, with the software downloaded and your account set up (don’t worry, it’s free – for the moment at least) you can start viewing. Unfortunately you’ll need your UK IP address to be active for the duration of your telly viewing, you can’t start the stream going and then disconnect the tunnel in order to better your bandwidth. But the results are, I must say, excellent. I’ve been out of the UK for 26 months now and it was decidedly odd sitting here in my office in Australia, watching a quiz show on BBC2 daytime.

If the shows that you want to watch are on ITV in the UK, then check out the caughtup plugin for Firefox. This rather cool addon transforms ITV’s piss-poor catchup service, enabling you to pause, fast forward and rewind. More importantly however, it sidesteps the geo-IP checkup so you can watch what you want, when you want, without needing a VPN or a proxy of any sort.

Current VPN Recommednation

I get a lot of emails from people asking me to recommend a VPN provider. So far I’ve either paid for or been given trial accounts to pretty much all of them. The company I *was* using for my VPNs was consult-here – but their service has gone to shit lately. If you could get connected at all, the connection dropped after about three and a half minutes with great regularity – and three of the four VPNs listed didn’t work at all.

So it was handy when the guys at Lamnia got in touch with me regarding their service. They gave me a month’s free trial to test their connection and I’ve been trying it out with all the usual suspects – BBC iPlayer, Channel 4 and Hulu. The first thing to say is that the support guys were always on hand and very helpful – a big difference from the other shadey VPN suppliers. The second thing is that Lamnia offer four UK VPNs, one US and one Canadian. That means you get the BBC and Hulu, which is great.

So – how did they fare. Well, pretty well all things considered. I’m in Australia and I don’t expect miracles when watching streaming video off the BBC’s iPlayer. You can see in the screenshot below how my connection fared – it’s pretty good – perfectly capable of watching things ‘live’ on the lower-end streams. Your mileage will vary depending on where you are in the world, but I find it very difficult to connect at the higher quality settings to the UK – that might change when the two new undersea fibre pipes go live here and when the Australian government complete the fibre-to-the-door national broadband network.

As you can see - you're not going to be able to watch 'live' on the iPlayer at the hi-def streams, but it's still very watchable at the lower end. If you're closer to the UK than me (I'm in Australia) you'll see marked improvements of course.

But yes – the connection was very good. The important thing was that it didn’t drop – which had been happening with annoying regularity with consult-here’s service. If you want to download a show from the iPlayer website, you only need the UK IP address for long enough to start it off – once it begins downloading you can drop the VPN and download from your main connection which tends to speed things up substantially.

The Lamnia US connection was solid enough to watch shows on Hulu without any interuptions. Hulu don’t broadcast at anywhere near the quality of the BBC though, so it was what I expecting. Anyway – it’s great to have that US option if you want. It’s also useful for things like Pandora which is an excellent geo-IP locked US streaming audio service. It also worked well with the CBS and Warner Bros video feeds.

So – thumbs up from me – my trial’s over and I’ll be ponying up cash to continue using the service.

Alternatives
There is an option that I hope to test soon. This requires a friendly broadband Internet connection in the UK and a bit of software called LogMeIn Hamachi which is a private VPN client/server. The way it works is that both you and your friend/family member in the UK install the Hamachi software and then when you want to watch UK telly you connect to your friend’s modem/router and thus dial out on their IP address. The downsides to this are a) they need a good quick connection with as much upstream bandwidth as possible b) they need to be vaguely technical to get it installed and running c) you’re using their bandwidth so if they’re on a quota you could end up costing them money and d) since you’re using a lot of bandwidth to view streaming video it’s only really of use when they’re not using their connection.

As cool as watching live UK TV is though, I still heartily recommend the newsgroups, which I cover in this post. You can get stuff pre-ripped, DRM free, in extremely fast download times. There’s very little I’ve failed to find on the newsgroups and it’s where the vast majority of my TV downloads come from.

If you’re a Mac user then I can also strongly recommend the iPlayer Downloader. This great bit of software enables you to download anything on the iPlayer site with one click. Files are saved in DRM-free .mov format and you can even cue-up multiple downloads. If you’re a Windows user then try this iPlayer Downloader which does the same job. Bear in mind though that you’ll still need a UK IP address to get either of these programs to work – they just get round the issue of removing DRM and changing file format that I previously addressed with Digital Media Converter.