Travel Help

How We Watch UK TV While Traveling The World

22nd March 2023

If like us, you travel the world for long periods of time and although you’re having the time of your life, you can’t help but miss certain things from home such as family, friends, fish and chips and a pint of proper beer. Another thing we miss is British television. We’ve travelled the globe extensively and yes we might be biased, but we think the UK produces some of the best TV in the world.

After we’ve been out all day exploring new cities, swimming in clear blue oceans, hiking up mountains or simply been working all day on our blog, we quite like spending the end of the day chilling out while catching up on the latest BBC drama, a groundbreaking Channel 4 documentary or trash out on Gogglebox and First Dates. Doing this also saves us money because without it we’d most likely be out a lot more while spending cash on numerous beers or coffees.

The Problem

The thing is unless we’re in the UK, which we never are these days, UK TV catch-up services such as BBC iPlayer, 4OD and ITV Player won’t work. Sure we can browse the websites to see what TV programmes have been showing back home, but if we try to watch something we’ll get an error message saying something along the lines of “this program is not available in your country”.

Why?

Because the internet is clever and it knows where you are at all times. When your device is connected to the internet it’s assigned an Internet Protocol Address (IP Address). I’m not going to go into what an IP Address is because it gets complicated and to be honest, I’m not the best person to tell you because I don’t know the details. All you need to know is that when using the internet your service provider will have assigned your device with an IP Address so your location can be known. Try entering into Google ‘what’s my ip address’ and Google will tell you. See!

So How Do We Watch UK TV When Abroad?

We hide our IP Address! Yes, it’s easy to hide your IP Address which means you can be browsing the internet in one country but the internet thinks you’re in another. While the downside of this is that it can be used by shady characters doing illegal activities, one of the many upsides is that we can watch UK TV from almost anywhere in the world!

How To Hide Your IP Address

There are a handful of ways to hide your IP Address:

Use a VPN Service
Use Tor
Use a Proxy Server
Use Free/Public WiFi

But by far the most reliable and fastest way to do so is by using a decent VPN service.

What Is a VPN Service?

A VPN service is a Virtual Private Network that not only hides your IP Address, it also gives you a new one from many countries around the world. So for example, we could be in our apartment in Thailand, or in a hotel in Bali, but by using a VPN service and connecting to one of their servers in the UK, the internet thinks we are browsing from the UK.

So this means that UK TV catch-up services like the already mentioned BBC iPlayer, 4OD and ITV Player also think we’re in the UK and allow us access to all their programmes!

We Can Recommend PureVPN

We’ve tried and tested a few VPN services while travelling and have found PureVPN to be the best for our needs of watching UK TV abroad plus a few other things.

We like PureVPN because it provides:

High-speed bandwidth
Easy to use
Secure connection
Private access to blocked sites
Ability to choose the country and city where you appear to be
The most amount of country options that we have come across from a VPN service
Available for iPhone/Android phones, iPads/Android tablets and Mac/Windows computers
Good pricing options
Good support if needed

How Much is PureVPN

PureVPN has three very competitive pricing options. Below are the full price costs but they regularly offer deals at various times of the year so it’s best to check out their website for up to date pricing.

1 month – $9.95
6 months – $7.95 per month
2 years – $2.45 per month

PureVPN also offers a 7-day money back guarantee so if for whatever reason you are not happy with the service, they will give you a full refund.

Using PureVPN Is So Easy

Once you have chosen your subscription, paid, downloaded and installed the app, PureVPN is super easy to use.

All you need to do is:

Open the app by clicking on the app logo on your device.
Choose the mode. There are 5 to choose from but for watching TV hit ‘Streaming’.
Choose the location you want to browse from. Choose United Kingdom if you want to watch UK TV.

In a few seconds, you’ll be browsing from your location of choice and you’ll be able to watch all the UK TV programmes you want!

purevpn review — PureVPN connecting to the UK from Thailand

When you no longer want to use PureVPN you can simply disconnect by a single click and you’ll be back browsing from your current destination. Simple!

Other Things We Use PureVPN For

We don’t only use PureVPN for watching UK TV while travelling.

Using a VPN service gives us extra security for when we’re using public networks in places like hotels and cafes. Clever criminals can access your data and passwords when sharing an IP address but we can make our connection secure by using PureVPN and changing our IP. This comes in very useful when doing things like online banking!

Some internet service providers also use dynamic IP addresses which means that although we are in the same location, our IP address is constantly changing. This is the case for our internet provider in our Thailand apartment and it causes us issues when using some email services. For security reasons, some email services will automatically log you out when the IP address is changed, this can be a real pain when we have several emails to send. By using PureVPN, we can stay logged in for as long as we want.

It really is as easy as we’ve made it out to be. If you’d like to keep up to date with your favourite UK TV programs while travelling the world, on a short holiday or business trip, PureVPN is the answer if you don’t mind spending just a few quid.