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 from their webpages. They said 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 enlight me how they plan on streaming the content.
They most likely will scan your IP and lookup your country from it. That means people from outside Britain won´t be able to view the matches on the BBC homepage. (or other homepages of other countries, you get my point I hope.) So, it would be impossible for an englishman, who is supporting his team in Germany, to view the live coverage on the BBC pages. 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 series 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. Browse for proxies that are located in the same country as the content provider of the streams.
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 the IP is different from the one the website displayed earlier when you checked your real 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 your are surfing relativly anonymous. The BBC website will check your IP and detect that you are coming from Britain and display their treasures for you. 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´ll be glad to 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.
Related posts:
- Select a country for your proxy
- Web Proxy Server List
- Howto watch ABC TV Streams outside the USA
- Firefox Football Worldcup Extension
- Watch Youtube Videos That Are Blocked In Your Country
- Free Web Proxy Checker
- Proxy Sites
- How To Create A Spotify Account From Anywhere
The Beeb have some very advanced measures for detecting where you are viewing from.
During the regular footie season I tried to listen to the BBC Radio Five Live audio feed. This is only available for UK listeners and after hours of fiddling around with UK proxies I never did get to listen. It just never worked for me.
I expect the same sort of thing for the broadband broadcast. Good luck to everybody in trying though.
They are only able to check your location from your IP so I would assume it will be working.. Will give it a try, only three days to go and we know :P
I would love to see if this actually will work. Thanks for the great article:)
The BBC is prolly streaming it using real media which might run on a different port that your proxy did not support webbie, just came to my mind :)
ermm wut about if i allready have a proxy in there… for normal web browsing.. how do i jump from prxy to prxy..?
You simply enter the proxy in the address bar, would look like this:
http://www.proxy.com/-_-http://www.destination.com/
or
http://123.456.789.012:80/http://www.destination.com/
great article, thank you!
Doesn’t work. Not sure HOW the BBC are doing it, but I tested it on their horse racing videos. It says about needing to change to high quality in the preferences page, then goes to load it, and says UK only.
This is with a working, valid, anonymous proxy setup for both Opera and Realplayer…
Can’t be done I don’t think. Clever bastards.
We will see ;) can you give me a link to one of their streams ?
No need to call it “the football world cup”. Just the World Cup will do – there’s none other (worthy of the name).
Excellent article, mind.
i do it for the search engines :P they are not that clever ^^
I’m trying to watch the World Cup on a Mac. Has anyone any ideas please ? All of the sites seem to be for Windows not OSX.
Thanks
John
I tried different proxy servers, no luck… Anyone came up with a different method? Surely there must be a loophole.
On the above BBC page it says:Q: Why is broadband viewing online restricted to UK residents?
A: The main reason is because the sports bodies, who hold the rights to events….
Q: How do you do this in practice?
A: We determine your location via the IP (Internet Protocol) address of your connection. From that, we can tell whether you are in the UK or not and whether you are entitled to see the content.
So I guess the proxy trick is going to work!!
The problem is that the BBC uses a list of UK broadband operators who have registered with them, so unless your IP address (i.e. that of the proxy) is registered with them it won’t work (according to BBC FAQs).
Brilliant posting – just what I’ve been looking for. With 2 hrs to go, I hope someone comes up with a good proxy. I haven’t found one myself but will share if I do. Keep working lads ;-)
see this thread if you have troubles connecting to the bbc website, it gives you instructions how to view the worldcup using a program called pplive
http://www.ghacks.net/2006/06/09/worldcup-preparations/
Yeah, I’m having the same problems as drood. Already tried it with three anonymous proxys that were working (took me to uk’s google site automatically) but the bastards won’t allow it.
Downloading pplive now.
I followed the instructions, but I cannot even surf a regular website using a UK proxy. No pages will load. I’m trying to surf from work and I usually use another proxy to get around our filter/firewall. Am I doing something wrong? many thanks in advance for any help.
Ok, so perhaps the BBC live video/audio won’t work (I’ve tried several UK IP addresses, with no luck)…does anyone have a line on ANY free english-language audio broadcast?
As a corollary, does anyone else find it amusing that spanish, portuguese, and german speakers enjoy several live and FREE online broadcasts, but that the “contractual rights” mentioned by the BBC (and ESPN360’s ridiculous server-provider limitations) severaly restrict participation by net-users in the world’s largest economic markets?
Bad business model…or are the too clever by half?
I found the best allround proxies are the CDN network but eventhough i have ones that trick whatismyproxy.com i can’t watch the bbc broadcast – looking into pplive now
i tried.. same problem as Drood.. doesn’t work on bbc.
PPLIVE site link above has been updated – it says “Download the latest Tuvplayer version from Rapidshare and select the channel ESPN2, they show the games live and it´s working.. ” and it is.
Does Tuvplayer (as described in post #25) work on a Mac? If not, any alternatives (other than buying a WinTel machine)?
Thanks guys,
The “pplive’ Program really works, I’m watching world cup now live. Thanks again
Rufus I don´t think it is working on a mac and I don´t know of a similar program for mac..
Rufus, any joy with getting a mac connection??????
here’s an idea…if your company has an office in the uk, what about logging into your office network but point your browser to use their uk proxy server? (if u know it of course)
For you macheads, parallels runs tuvplayer just fine. I\’m watching the espn2 feed now! on my Mac!
Pay parallels $40 and buy (edited by admin) a copy of windoze, and your set
i was told to download from bittorent- dont mind waiting a while- but cant find any uploads of matchs. i am a complete novice at this stuff- ideas?
thanks
Anyone know of a way to set preferences for TVU player? I keep having to wait for it to buffer.
Mac OS X users who are having trouble with other solutions use peercast
http://www.peercast.org/
No joy yet with the Mac…I’m attempting a fix on BootCamp + TVUPlayer, but the going is slow. Just caught hte peercast.org post and will try that now…more to come!
England 1-0 Paraguay: how can that much talent win on nothing more than an own-goal?
Hey Macfan: downloaded peercast…now what? Is there a committed worldcup channel available? A yellowpages search produces no effective results.
Jonathan did you select the low or high speed channel ? If you tried the high one try the low one instead.
Ok…are there ANY mac users who’ve successfully engaged peercast?
any support for gnu/linux?
how is pplive bypassing the bbc blockage?
rufus I tried it myself but it seems for this game the feed is not working… make sure you search “TV”
tux pplive has nothing to do wirh the bbc stream. it´s an alternative to it
Using Mac OSX tried peercast… no results. What next?
The stream is good, excellent match watching from the web ~
semiotics…a little more detail in the future
I am just trying to get a bbc radio commentary for live matches to replace the crap commentary on ESPN and ABC. Any ideas? The instructions above do not seem to work. I think the bbc has some pretty sophisticated filters.
Whats the website for pplive?
OI! Stop stealing from the BBC.
It’s funding by British taxpayers – it’s not free for us – we’ve paid for it. Get your own country to pay for it.
Today I watched England – Paraguay online from here:
http://www.worldcupwatcher.com
Hope you find it useful!!!
Madison, we’re also stealing from ESPN, not that it matters. BBC, ESPN…no matter the source, when leisure is at stake Americans assiduously display the ideals of democracy.
Write your politicians to end your TV tax. Until then, whine elsewhere.
Ana the website for pplive is.. pplive.com :P
Madison, we are not stealing from tbe BBC. They are broadcasting the show and some people managed to watch it..
I’ll stop stealing your “paid-for-by-Brits” BBC when you stop stealing my paid-for-by-American-taxpayers GPS sat-nav service. Deal? Get your own sat-nav service.
It’s coming soon! It’s called Galileo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_positioning_system