How to view the football worldcup online

Some TV stations, like the BBC in Britain, will provide their fellow countrymen with an opportunity to watch the football world cup 2006 in Germany live in a streamed version on their Internet pages. The BBC stated on their webpage that "The service will be available to UK broadband users and will mirror terrestrial and interactive coverage." I assume it is free of charge but maybe my loyal British readers could enlighten me how they plan on streaming the content.

They most likely will scan your IP and look-up your country using it. That means people from outside Britain won't be able to view the matches on the BBC homepage (or other homepages in other foreign countries, you get my point I hope). This also means that if you are from the UK but not at home during the World Cup that you cannot watch football on the BBC website, for instance because you are in Germany to support your team.

As you all know, there are always ways to circumvent country checks, here is the one I suggest.

Last time it was ABC who did not allow their TV shows to be viewed by people from outside the USA and the method that I described back then is still valid for the World Cup (or any other streaming content on the INTERNET).

But this time I want to introduce a faster method which should work most of the time for you. Visit a website like whatismyproxy.com to check on your own IP. Remember this IP, you will come back to this site and check the IP again with a proxy enabled.

Search Google using strings like "country proxy list", "england proxy list" and the like. You will come up with search results like publicproxyservers.com or proxy server list. All show a table with proxies including the country the proxy is hosted in. Browse for proxies that are located in the same country as the content provider of the streams. The idea here is to find a working proxy hosted in a country that the streaming service has whitelisted. So, to stay with the BBC example, you would have to find a proxy from the UK to watch the TV streams on the BBC website.

Copy one of the IPs and remember the port. In Firefox open Tools --> Options. Select Connection Settings and select Manual Proxy Configuration. Add the IP to the HTTP Proxy Row and enter the Port in the field next to it. Click Use this proxy server for all protocols and test it by navigating to the whatismyproxy.com website again. See if the page loads fast and verify that the IP is different from the one the website displayed earlier when you checked your own IP.

If you see a different IP it means two things. First, the proxy is working (assuming it does not take ages to load pages) and second that your own IP is now hidden behind the proxy's IP.  The BBC website will check your IP and detect that you are coming from Britain and allow you to watch the streams. Note that it is still possible to detect your real IP by the means of Java for example.

If you have questions let me know, I will happily try and help out. The great advantage of this method is that you can check and use proxies no matter what operating system you are using. A disadvantage is that it could take a while until you find a fast working proxy that is located in the country you need. If you have troubles try Charon to verify proxies, the how to is available from my ABC article.

Update:

Take a look at my worldcup preparations article for a working method that involves downloading a software. You will be able to see the matches live with English commentary.

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