Hacker News Reader

Comment by RcouF1uZ4gsC | Hacker News Reader

Is BBC iPLayer still geolocked to the UK? There are bunch of BBC productions that I would love to watch, that I would gladly pay money for online access, but I have not been able to.

It has been some time since, I tried, so I don't know if they have changed.

View on HN

> Is BBC iPLayer still geolocked to the UK? There are bunch of BBC productions that I would love to watch, that I would gladly pay money for online access, but I have not been able to.

Get a VPN (Nord is practically spamming it with 1/2 pricing on every podcast) and donate 100 quid to the BBC as a write off. Done. That's what I did.

Or better yet since this is YC, buy a laptop (or a few used ones off of ebay depending on your budget) to help kids in the UK without one in their charity drive [0].

This was one of the first things I used to do with TOR before it was a simple thing and required you to build your own SOCKS proxy setting back in the day (2008?) and had to learn to bypass the iplayer Geo-restrictions. I even did it when I lived in the UK for a bit just for the hell of it to prove that I could do it. Fun times!

Honestly, I wish I would have created backups of Saturday Kitchen archives from back in the day; it had so many Michelin star chefs from all over Europe/US as guests just screwing around and making dishes from their flagships in a casual setting, drinking wine the shows 'wacky' sommelier picked out and just generally BSing on screen with omelette challenges and taking guest calls that made me think it was worth going to Europe to try my hand in.

And now being retired from that Industry and seeing how COVID has shaken out for the culinary Industry I wanted to go back and watch them just to cheer up about the 'good ol days' but even youtube has very limited options for those episodes.

They had a 1.5 month back catalog if I recall correctly, but I'm not even sure if that show is still on the air anymore.

0: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5SqHJMTKZx5sYhlltX...

Saturday Kitchen is definitely still on air and the format is more or less the same as it's been since the Anthony Worral Thompson days. It's become a bit of an institution I think.

> Saturday Kitchen is definitely still on air and the format is more or less the same as it's been since the Anthony Worral Thompson days. It's become a bit of an institution I think.

That's good to hear, James Martin was my favorite host, as he came up the hard way despite going through the culinary school route; but to be honest I liked when they were rotating TV 'chefs' as presenters as it showed how they varied and their respective approaches and cuisines.

Are there any torrents or archive Online?

Yes. I agree he was a great host. Not sure if there are torrents/archives but you can find it on iPlayer catchup if you're interested in watching the current ones (assuming you have a way to access iPlayer).

"BritBox" is the "iPlayer for the world", but it's not the same content. https://www.britbox.com/

The BBC content on BritBox should be free for all UK residents, seeing as we paid for it to be made via the TV Licence and shouldn't be asked to pay for it twice. For this reason alone I will never subscribe to BritBox, and encourage other people (in the UK) not to either.

I may be mistaken but really we don’t pay for the full production cost and don’t really own them per se.

Do you think DVDs of BBC content should be free in the UK as well?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com