You may have seen adverts selling IPTV (basically TV over the internet) sold as an alternative to satellite, usually to UK expats who want their dose of the BBC. We have seen this offered on cheap android tv boxes for high prices, 10 x what they cost!

You can set this up yourself, for much less, certainly if you have a smart tv already.

So what do you need? Well if you want to watch :

1. Sign up for a VPN account something like Hide my ass (HMA) works well but there are others. What does this do? It lets you connect to the internet as if you were in another country (the UK for example).

If you are going watch tv on your computer you don’t need anything else just install the free software from the HMA site you may want to change the settings to use UK servers only when connected your computer will browse the internet as if it was in the country you selected.

2. If you want to use this on your smart TV, Game console or smart Blu-ray player then you will need some kind of router this is where it gets a little more complicated. As your device usually cannot connect directly to the VPN service the router can be setup to do this then anything connect to it will connect to the VPN service. You can’t buy any router as you need to install some custom software on it called DD-WRT which you can download from here and this only works on some routers. A list of compatible routers can be found here. This router works quite well: the TP-Link TL-WR1043ND . Once you have your router and have downloaded the correct firmware for it you need to enter the routers settings pages and update the firmware. Instructions for installing can be found here. You must then enter your HMA settings your username and password and a uk Ip address find instructions for set-up here.

3. No smart TV, Game console or smart Blu-ray player don’t panic – just buy a Roku, you can get them from AmazonHERE

NordVPN