BEVS

Okays.

But getting that from you lot in a big smoke to here

AndyEvs

Thing is, i do watch all of my tv on the TV (and the ipad) so I'm not sure what your point is. The cost of unotelly + netflix is far preferable to what you are suggesting and I get iplayer, 4OD and all the UK TV I can cope with. Set up took minutes and I stream it all via my Apple TV to a big Panasonic screen.
Just checking the NowTVUK website it looks like the basic package is £25 per month compared to the £15 I pay at the moment. It's a no-brainer.
Considering the cost of living here, I'll stick with the better package for less money!
Of course it's different strokes for different folks, our internet is VDSL and we have 500Gb per month which means I can stream to my heart's content.

BBFLBoy

It's all down to preference I suppose. I've used the various means to watch UK TV. VPNs, online sites and my iPad and mirrored through Apple TV. It's okay but the convenience of a set-top box with a remote to change channels and go back 7 days and watch any show, not those dictated by what iPlayer does or doesn't allow you to watch is far better in my opinion. I also download and keep shows on a USB stick so I have a little library of shows to keep me going on rainy days.

The iPlayer site's don't give you an EPG and sometimes I find searching for shows a pain. But horses for courses I guess. I don't think £25 is a lot to ask for something that makes my viewing pleasure complete and they're adding more channels all the time, way more than you can get online.

davros1984

In NZ - whilst you can get faster broadband, the real issue here is international bandwidth. You are lucky to be able to sustain 2Mbps to the UK. Typically I can achieve in the region of 1-1.5Mbps.

The best I have been able to achieve to the USA is around 6-7Mbps. This is with Telecom, who in my experience have provided the best level of international bandwidth. This is why I switched from Orcon to Telecom.

This is why VPN's are generally useless. I thus use a combination of proxy and smart dns technology. I can watch all UK tv across a number of devices, iplayer, itvplayer, skygo, 4od all for less than 5 quid a month. That sounds like far better value than 25 quid a month for a set top box where there is no guarantee that it will even work. Yes - I have a Sky UK subscription that I use (but I'd have to pay for that if I lived in the UK).

BBFLBoy

You're assuming that all of their servers are in the UK only, which they aren't. They have various servers located in multiple countries (some in Denver I believe) so the bandwidth gained from the numerous hops that the signals takes to get to you from the UK is not a problem as most of the channels I watch have a localised servers to alleviate that.