Dan@Disney

With the Olympics coming up I asked myself the question – can I watch BBC TV coverage from America? I did a bit of research and discovered it is posible – it will work for any UK video site – 4oD, ITV Player etc just as well.

Below I describe how to technically achieve watching iPlayer from the USA – whether it is legal or not is a little bit questionable so proceed at your own risk. I include it for educational purposes only.

Step 1 – Install Firefox

Step 2 – Open Firefox

Step 3 – Download and Install FoxyProxy Standard

Step 4 – Download and Install the FoxyProxy Video Utility for Windows or Mac and install it

Step 5 – Buy a subscription to the FoxyProxy service, this costs £8 per month and you can either choose to be billed every month or just pay one time. Make sure you select UK as the country and you can then pay using PayPal or a credit card. You will receive an email with the information you need. This works out as about $5 a week…

Step 6 – Open Firefox and open FoxyProxy which should be a small fox icon next to the address bar. Click Add New Proxy and in Manual Proxy Configuration enter the hostname and port from the email.

Step 7 – In URL patterns choose add new pattern and add *bbc.co.uk* as a whitelist site using wildcards. Press OK.

Step 8 – In the main window make ‘Use proxies based on their pre-defined patterns and priorities’ is selected (if you want to use for sites other than iPlayer choose ‘use proxy for all URLs’)

Step 9 – The first time you go to iPlayer it will ask for your username and password – these are in the email and must be typed in rather than copied and pasted.

Step 10 (Optional) – If you are having problems getting the site to work run the FoxyProxy video utility and enter the details of the hostname and port from the email. This should solve most problems.