Watch the Olympics from anywhere: this actually works | Hacker News Reader

Watch the Olympics from anywhere: this actually works

gist.github.com

116 pointsirq63 comments

As I've said in other comments. This is fun and hackerish but it's cheaper and simpler to just sign up for a VPN for a month that has UK gateways. Like https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/ for $6.95

That's what I've been using and it works great. Some of their US nodes are slow, probably because overloaded, but I maxed out my 20 Mbit internet connection testing their UK London server.

Edit: I should also point out that a $20 Linode box just for VPN is overkill. If you really want to go the VPS route, there are plenty of sub-$10 VPS providers in the UK.

If you email me at coderrr.contact@gmail.com I can try to help figure out why you get slow speeds on some of our US servers. None of our servers are even running near capacity.

It would have been good courtesy to declare your affiliation with this company in your original comment

Yea I should have. I guess I forgot to because I had already done so in these other comments [1] and wrongly assumed everyone had read them as well. Anyway, I'm the cofounder of said service.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307364 and http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4307380

I really wish I could just subscribe to iPlayer. I don't want to subscribe to a cable or satellite service that I wouldn't use (and then pay extra for BBC channels), and I like a lot of their content. I'd gladly pay the BBC money for easy, legal online access to it.

I'd like to see this happen just so that British taxes aren't being spent providing free coverage to people in other countries.

If they wanted to do that they'd need to have global streaming rights, which would cost much much much much more than the marginal bandwidth taken up by the fraction of users with the tech savvy to set up a proxy.

They must have negotiated some international broadcasting rights; BBC 1 and 2 are on many Dutch cable systems, and show the Olympics live. And that is not because it was easier for them to get rights for this Olympics; they did this with all previous Olympics, too. BBC iPlayer is not available in the Netherlands, though.

This is largely a historical anomaly in the rights. The terrestrial broadcasts were received in the Netherlands so broadcast rights the BBC gets still include this at tleast in some cases.

The Olympics are bought collective for Europe by the EBU/Eurovision and then their members broadcast them so for the Olypics the BBC may have Euopean rights from the IOC.

Are you sure it's for this reason? I always thought it was a bit dodgy - basically some European broadcasters effectively pirate the unencrypted broadcasts. This was only ever speculation, but in some countries channels occasionally disappear for a while and later come back.

I'm sure it was mentioned at some point in my BBC Broadcast Engineer training but it was nearly 12 years ago now so it could be a be figment of my imagination. I certainly remember there was some acknowledged situation regarding the Netherlands.

I think there was some gray area during the transition to digital/not over the air broadcasting, but I. Doubt there ever was some true pirating. If there were, surely the Beeb and/or Hollywood would have taken legal action.

Also, see http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2011/01/27/kpn-tv-get-domesti.... The reason that the Netherlands has BBC television probably is historic (and fairly weird; even in the west of the country, one needed precisely the right kind of atmosphere to receive a fairly noisy signal), but nowadays, money does change hands.

So much for free trade.

Who exactly would the BBC have to pay for "global streaming rights" to content they already own?

In this particular instance, the IOC.

I think the OP meant access to regular BBC programming; not the Olympic coverage.

While the Beeb does produce a lot of its own programming, there is also much of it that is done in partnership with other public broadcasters outside of the UK and with corporate bodies who have distribution rights (which are a part of copyright) outside of the UK, whether those rights are exercised or not. The BBC having distribution rights in the UK does not automatically grant them rights to distribute outside of the UK.

They don't "own" all the content. For example, they need to pay royalties for any music they use to the local collection societies (ASCAP, SESAC or BMI in the US).

Or you can just tunnel through the ssh connection to your VM, I do this all the time to watch BBC.

    ssh -D 9050 [user]@[vm.ip]

You now have a SOCKS proxy on port 9050. Done!

while you can easily set a SOCKS proxy for your browser, flash will still use your normal connection.

Which is more efficient if the sites don't care where the flash connection comes from (like, apparently, the BBC)

Actually, the Flash BBC iPlayer will _not_ work if it connects from the United States. Additionally, I discovered that the BBC is using Akamai for streaming their live content, and Akamai's United States servers do not have the content. So even if you convince the BBC that you're in England, but talk to Akamai servers in the US, the content does not stream.

Interestingly, BBC is using Limelight for pre-recorded content, and that content is apparently cached globally.

I never tried the live streams - the time difference was inconvenient enough.

Live content gets licensed differently to the catch-up content, which you can view without paying the license fee. Given catch-up is usually more restricted (some programmes unavailable for example) I imagine the only reason Limelight is globally accessible is because that's the default mode of operation and the iPlayer website is considered a sufficient region restriction mechanism.

Flash with Firefox on Linux respects the SOCKS proxy setting.

flash in OSX will work just fine through a SOCKS connection that you setup in systems prefs -> network. however it won't work with just an HTTP proxy.

This is patently untrue, at least with the latest Flash in Mountain Lion. If you read the top paragraph of my post, you'd know this.

i don't know what to tell you but i'm doing it right now using an ssh proxy with ssh -D in ML with the latest flash (also on a SL machine next to me) to a VPS i have in UK (i'm from Canada).

Indeed, Flash on OS X (at least, in Mountain Lion anyway) does not respect proxy settings. Additionally, the Flash BBC iPlayer will not work if it connects from the United States, despite what SG- has said below.

You may also wish to add -C2qTnN[1]. At least -C2 for compression.

[1] https://calomel.org/firefox_ssh_proxy.html

As I stated at the top of my gist (did you read it?) and in other comments here, this simply does not work using the latest Flash in Mountain Lion. In this situation, Flash ignores proxy settings, and streaming does not work.

Or you could just use the unlimited TunnelBear VPN for $5 a month.

And potentially send sensitive traffic through an untrusted third party. Some people are comfortable with that, some people aren't.

You can disconnect from the VPN after you're done watching.

All of the UK-endpoint VPN providers I considered were sketchy in one way or another, and most of them had very poor speeds from the UK to the US. A VPN connection usually bypasses your local firewall too, depending on configuration, which means you really, really have to trust the people running your VPN service, and trust that they isolated their customers from each other. Linode, on the other hand, is a well-respected company with extremely good connectivity (I get 160ms pings from San Diego, CA and more than 30mbit/s transfer). And I know the guy who is running my VPN service on Linode: me.

If you're the kind of person who gladly exchanges security and privacy for $10 to $15, then those other options are for you.

And how do you determine that Linode is more trustworthy than TunnelBear?

I'm not sure about the legalities abroad but in the UK at least it's illegal to watch this stream without a TV licence and they do try and prosecute people if they can find an address attached to your IP, obviously this isn't possible through this method but just a heads up.

Another option which doesn't require a tv licence is TVCatchup.com which legally streams UK TV channels (to the UK only).

Although I will say the BBC interface is far better and allows you to go back to the start if you press play on the live player half way through and of course is ad free.

Regardless, I condone this as NBC should allow everyone to watch online live and if they don't people will go to better alternatives.

> they do try and prosecute people if they can find an address attached to your IP

How? Will the ISPs actually just hand those out?

They do a surprising amount, they seriously have vans that drive around scanning to see if you're watching television on a physical TV and if so if you don't have a licence they'll fine you

I'm not sure if they are actually finding out if you have a TV licence on the stream yet but I wouldn't be surprised if they are/do.

The effectiveness of detector vans is an urban myth.

The only confirmed tactics is requiring stores selling TVs to collect the address of the buyer and knocking on the doors of people not paying the licence in the assumtion that they actually have a TV.

They drove a very obvious looking "detector van" around near our university halls for a few days, and a few days later every person that had a TV and no license got a letter, got scared, and paid up.

Of course, everyone that had no TV and no license also got a letter... and so did everyone that already had a TV license!

they seriously have vans that drive around scanning to see if you're watching television on a physical TV

There's been some debate about whether these vans truly did any "detection". It may actually have been an elaborate bluff.

Most of their efforts, especially recently, are just pestering every UK address which doesn't have a license (relatively few nowadays).

In the early days, when TVs were badly shielded and (more importantly) few and far between, and where radio transmitters were rare, it's plausible that simply listening for electromagnetic noise would yield usable results.

Today, to believe that a machine exists (in secrecy, no less) that can detect from a considerable distance, through walls, if someone is watching live TV (watching non-live TV without a license is legal) on iPlayer on their computer in a setting overflowing with all sorts of legitimate electromagnetic radiation is, frankly, laughable.

Using TVCatcup.com absolutely does require a license - the license rule is about "watching live TV in the UK", it doesn't matter if you're doing it on a TV, from iPlayer or from a third party.

If I don't care about watching it live, can I just get the recording in a torrent?

There are definitely a lot of recordings on Usenet...

Sure, the opening ceremony has more than 8000 seeds: http://torrentz.eu/search?f=olympics

I did something similar to watch hulu from Canada awhile back but I had split tunnelling disabled where all traffic goes through the vpn so no messing around with static routes and ips. Also setup a local DNS cache on the VPS and configured openvpn to use the VPS DNS cache when connected. CDN's generally use the ip of the DNS request to determine where to direct your browser to download the media, static host entries would avoid the DNS request though. I no longer have it setup, but I do have my config backed up somewhere. If someone's interested I'll look for it.

If you're in europe you can watch it live at NRK (Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation), but the commentary will ofcourse be in Norwegian. NRK has excellent coverage, with 7 (9 including NRK1 and NRK2) dedicated channels.

See more: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&tl...

Works great. This way you don't have to send all your traffic through the VPN, only the requests that are used to geolocate you.

You can use the same method to bypass MLB.tv blackout restrictions.

Instead of a Linode box, I use a privatetunnel.com VPN (free starter available) and modify the config:

  route-nopull # (to avoid sending all traffic through)
  route outbound-ip netmask # ex: route 8.8.8.8 255.255.255.0

I found this resource to be helpful in actually getting the routes working. In particular, setting up NAT to forward traffic from the VPN to the outside world:

https://library.linode.com/networking/openvpn/ubuntu-10.10-m...

Or just sign up for a distance learning course from a UK university. Aberdeen gives you a proxy, the OU as far as I know, doesn't.

If the BBC changes their IP addresses and I haven't updated the IP list, you can simply adjust your VPN client settings to route all traffic over the VPN connection. Viscosity makes this easy. That will always work, but will cause other Internet services to think you're in England, and make things feel a bit slower overall.

The same thing that the people need to access "How I need your mother".

After a few years, the easiest solution is to just buy a prxoy. Normally cheaper.

I reckon it'll just be a matter of time until the BBC start blocking traffic from IP ranges that look like VPS hosting companies.

Hopefully this method won't become too mainstream since it requires some hacking.

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