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Comment by colinbartlett | Hacker News Reader

We've been streaming the BBC's coverage via a VPN. It's been great. The iMac is close enough proximity to the TV that a Thunderbolt to HDMI cable reaches. With a full screen mode Chrome, the quality is great.

I've had a VPN for some time just for security reasons, but I suddenly get even more value for my $40/year.

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I've found unblock-us to be a superior solution. It doesn't actually tunnel the traffic, instead, it proxies the original request to the content site (BBC, Netflix in another region etc.) via an appropriate IP to authenticate. After that, the content flows directly from the origin to your device. All you need on the client side is to use their (unblock-us's) DNS. This allows you to use any device (and not just a computer capable of running some VPN client) to access the remote content while pretending to be in another region.

And yes, I'd just as happily pay directly for bbc content if they'd let me. BBC, why can't you let me pay your annual TV license fee and let me watch your internet content from anywhere.

I've been wondering how those work. I can understand how using a different DNS server can trick a streaming server which does the user distinction purely by DNS (in other words, only users from a certain region get the right IP address for the server).

But I am unsure how the mechanism you describe works in detail (tricking the server to see a domestic IP, but having it send data to a foreign one).

Living in the US: I've been using tunnelbear (https://www.tunnelbear.com/) to proxy through the UK to watch the BBC streams.

NBC is worse than horrible, their commentators rarely understand the sport they are covering, they don't show events they want to cover in 'prime time' and they cut massively short the events they do cover in prime time, often times in order to substitute political bullshit.

I would love to pay the BBC to access their content, but there isn't a way to do that. Please BBC, fix this, I'll happily pay you a premium to consume your content, just let me.

Where does the BBC keep this streaming content? I can't find it anywhere on their sporting site.

http://www.bbc.com/sport/winter-olympics/2014 Need UK IP of course, get hola.org plugin

Canadian stream is also live after midnight here: http://olympics.cbc.ca/index.html it will have an option for live streaming whenever it's back on.

Which VPN provider?

vpn.sh's UK locations are overloaded right now, StrongVPN seems to work if you can get a slot in the UK (use the ping tests to get one that's under 400ms from your location) and I've had a second hand recommendation for whatsonthebox.net.

http://PrivateInternetAccess.com

You can also just spin up a Linode in their UK zone and then use an SSH tunnel through that. When the Olympics are over spin down the vm and you're done.

vpnuk.info has worked well for me.

The BBC's coverage is pretty good, and you can watch full events for every sport.

Its definitely worth the one-month cost to get access.

I'f you can get a vpn into Canada it's even better, CBC has every event on demand as well as highlights, etcetera for free. As a Canadian, it's wonderful and reduced my productivity by 90% the past few days.

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