Just a quick follow up post regarding watching UK tv from Poland – rather than set up our own British in Poland dedicated server it works out even cheaper to just use the VPN services from a company called HideIP VPN.
Their VPN service is marketed towards those people who want to mask their IP address for privacy reasons (hence the name “Hide IP”) but it serves our purpose of making a computer appear to be based in the UK.
I have tested it using both Windows XP and on two installations of Ubuntu and it worked fine on both the BBC iPlayer and ITV Player websites.
On TVCatchup.com I got a blocked access message but TVCatchup block all VPN servers so I don’t think there is much that can be done about that.
If you want to use their service you can get it for 5.99 USD / month and they offer unlimited and unmetered bandwidth – I think that is a hard offer to beat.
Also from my testing I can report that you really need to have a minimum 1MB internet connection to be able to stream TV content. I am restricted to a crappy 512Kb connection and streaming just doesn’t work – it spends more time buffering than playing which makes it impossible to watch anything. Therefore I had to download programmes in entirety first and watch them off-line later.