JustinI

Does anyone no the best way to get British TV (not BBC America) in the USA? Is there a satelite TV company or something that people use?

fatbrit

uknova

DeanUK2US

Sorry to hijack this thread, but I also need to get US TV in the UK. Any suggestions?

penguinsix

slingboxes are your best bet.

Goodacre

It's a regular (and of course important) question here. My guess is that most of us use the bit-torrent sites like The Box and UK Nova to get access to British TV.

There are no free, legal ways of accessing content that I am aware of other than bits and pieces on BBC America and one or two other channels. Some use a sling box, located in a friend or relative's house back in the UK, but I don't know how widespread that practice is, or how effective. There is a commercial service that lets you rent a slingbox in the UK too, http://www.thetelly.net/ , but I think some fear that it is only a matter of time before it gets closed down.

The BBC have indicated that they are hoping at some point in the future to extend the iPlayer for international users, perhaps through some kind of subscription service, but it does not look imminent.

Ash UK/US

OMG did you check out the pricing on that!

Goodacre

Yes -- right! One of their FAQs made me smile:

Ash UK/US

LOL why would anyone want to get it for free when they can pay £175 setup then £55 (for the very basic) and lets not forget that you also have to buy a UK TV License too!

Xebedee

An extremely long cable.

penguinsix

Just to expand a bit.

By and large, there are no satellite options due to the curve of the Earth. The satellites that service Europe simple are 'below the horizon' and those that serve say Africa (which might be visible) are not aiming their 'beams' at the US. The BBC World TV is available on the C-Band (i.e. 2 meter dishes and above) but I gather that is not what you are looking for.

Setanta North America is a remix of the Setanta feed from the UK and Ireland, and you can get that on Dish Network, DirectTV or by buying a FTA dish from Globecast. Fox Soccer Channel carries some programming from Sky Sports.

Slingboxes, devices that use the Internet to 'sling' live tv from place to place are very popular with expats, but they require you to have a 'home' or location in the UK where you can connect the slingbox to send over the signal.

A number of people use 'torrents' which are sort of a grey area of legality. You can download pretty much any major UK program (Doctor Who, Little Britain, etc) within 24 hours of it being shown. Download vuze as an example of this tech. http://www.vuze.com/app

You can also hook up a p2p TV program such as Sopcast or TVAnts. They were designed by Chinese college students to let their friends overseas watch Chinese TV online (random aside--China is a leader in IPTV). Once you have Sopcast or TVAnts you can go to a site like http://myp2p.eu and catch a lot of wild feeds from the UK, including Sky, ITV and occasionally some BBC. Also tons of sports--just scads of sports programming.

Many new TVs have VGA or DVI inputs on the back, allowing you to hook up an old computer to the TV and 'broadcast' whatever you see on the screen onto the big TV. While it isn't perfect and certainly not HD quality, with some streams the quality is certainly watchable.

For now, if what you want is to turn on the TV and just have UK programming on basically, well, just on--you are looking at a Slingbox. If you are looking for some specific sporting events at a specific time, you have a few other options. If you are looking for a specific show, then torrents and downloads are your best bet.

Longy

Just a note, you can get Setanta on Verizon Fios now as well.

There is also a company called Nextv which allows you to watch it on tv via the internet - not sure how good the quality is, but obviously you need a decent bandwidth for this.

DeanUK2US

Interesting! Thanks for that penguinsix!

penguinsix

What you might consider is a 'Slingbox swap' where you hook up a slingbox in the UK in exchange for some US based person hooking up a slingbox in the US. You give each other the access codes and can watch the others TV.

The only rub about slingbox is if the 'hosting' person changes the channel, then you get whatever they changed to. If they have a power failure or don't pay their cable bill, then you're basically dead.

hobbes79

I gave up on the Slingbox idea. The reality is, when I sit down to watch TV at 7:00PM EST, it's already midnight in the UK... not much on I want to see then.

So live UK TV is a little pointless. I could have a DVR in the UK, setup on Freeview, which would cost little to setup and since no subscription a friend or family member could just set it up in a spare room... or even the loft! No channel changing or subscriptions to worry about.

But if I'm not going to see it live, it brings me back to using torrents... which is what I do. I really like UKnova. I have a DivX player and burn files to a re-writable DVD disc. I can get about 12-hours of TV on each burn I do. Plenty to keep me occupied, I get to see it when I want, and all the adverts are edited out!

Ray

How can TV programs be so important ....sad sad ...