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Comment by mikekchar | Hacker News Reader

As someone who has lived in many different countries, I find this stuff so frustrating. When I was living in England, my wife and I wanted to watch Japanese anime (in Japanese). Luckily Crunchyroll exists and it has quite a large amount of content for a very low price (I think we were paying 4 pounds per month). But now that I'm back in Japan, we want to watch shows from BBC... basically not possible legally. I really enjoyed watching cycling on Eurosport. Good luck.

I really wonder who is going to pay $35 a month for US shows, while you are already in the US. There are just so many other ways to get that content.

I hope one day before I die the media companies will realise that their old idea of breaking up the world into pieces and sublicensing is a stupid one.

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> I hope one day before I die the media companies will realise that their old idea of breaking up the world into pieces and sublicensing is a stupid one.

If not, at least you can die laughing

You can watch iPlayer via a VPN or DNS service like unblock.us (do not know if they have service in Japan).

Note to the BBC - I would be to pay 3x the license fee to be able to watch on the internet with a subscription from outside the U.K. I bet if you opened it up world wide you would make more money then you do on the all the U.K license fees.

Even the BBC isn't powerful enough to do this. I can't remember who it was but one of the heads of the BBC said for a long time that content on BBC should be available for free everywhere. He reasoned that it was already paid for. It's one of the reason that they do so much free software development.

One of the shows that I want to watch is Match of the Day. Not sure what the situation is like now, but when I was in the UK the BBC was having a huge problem trying to negotiate the rights to put it on the iPlayer (strangely MOTD2 was OK ???). It would be impossible if they needed international distribution :-(

For freeview UK channels, you can watch some of them on FilmOn[1]

I'm a rugby fan and it's possible to watch high quality, BBC or ITV coverage of the Six Nations from abroad (BBC Scotland on Wales/Scotland has the higher quality for free). I'm pretty sure that Americans can't watch it though judging by comments on Reddit.

[1] https://www.filmon.com/tv/bbc-news

I moved from Scotland to Finland, and one of the things I really missed was UK TV. I'd love to have paid for it, but there aren't any really great options.

Initially I bought a NowTV subscription, with a home-made proxy setup. That worked for a long time, but then they caught on, and most of the VPN-providers became blacklisted too.

Nowadays I'm using FilmOn with a Roku box. I've slowly weaned myself off UK TV, but there are afternoons where I just want to sit on a sofa and watch two hours of "Come Dine With Me" for the snarking. I wish I could pay for it ..

Both Match of the Day's are now available on the iPlayer every week - I think from the Tuesday after airing. Still a bunch of asinine restrictions, but it's there. I remember it was like you say when they first started it.

I disagree since I am already paying for a licence in the UK I am barely able to take advantage of (I live outside the UK for 9 months a year). I am rather annoyed that I have do a workaround to watch stuff I have paid for.

I get especially annoyed when I also have to 'prove' I have a licence by ticking a box.

In other words, it's easier to get for free outside the UK than it is to pay for it.

> You can watch iPlayer via a VPN or DNS service like unblock.us (do not know if they have service in Japan).

Just had to do a second take to appreciate the irony of a geoblocking circumvention service being geoblocked.

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