OverPlay

Many broadcasting companies now provide TV shows over the Internet but you’re unable to watch most of them unless you live in their country of origin.  For example, you can’t watch Hulu unless you live in the United States, you can’t watch BBC iPlayer unless you live in the United Kingdom and you can’t use the RTE Player unless you live in Ireland.

Fortunately that’s no longer a problem thanks to a solution from OverPlay.  Using OverPlay you can have access to TV shows from the UK, US, Ireland, Canada, Switzerland, and Sweden and that list keeps getting bigger.  OverPlay provide a VPN service with one or more servers in several countries.  The current price at the time of writing is $9.95 (USD) a month and that single price gives you access to ALL of those servers.

Not only that but there are no bandwidth limitations so you can watch as much as you like.  They also provide their own software so it’s easy to set up and use, however you can use your own PPTP and OpenVPN diallers if you want that flexibility.

The other advantage to using a good VPN service is that they provide a good level of anonymity.  With governments taking an increasing interest in their citizens’ Internet activities and in some cases filtering content that they don’t like, they can be a good way of accessing the true, uncensored Internet.

Overplay

Hulu is an awesome web site that allows lucky americans to pick from a very large library of TV programs and stream them over the Internet for free.  Awesome… but if you’re not in the United States you can’t use it.  Instead you’ll get a message along the lines of “Sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed from within the United States”.  Boo!

Not all is lost though!  You see, Hulu just looks at your computer’s I.P. address to determine which country you’re in and you can change that using Virtual Private Networking or VPN.  One company that can set you up with this is OverPlay for about £6 a month which is peanuts considering what you’ll get access too.  They have several servers in the United States and you can use VPN to relay your connection through them so that when Hulu takes a look at your computer’s I.P. address it sees the U.S. server’s address instead of your own.

It might sound complicated but it’s super simple to setup and they even have software that you can download to configure it all for you.

An added bonus is that it also works for videos at CBS and other similar U.S. sites.  Also if you’re outside of the United Kingdom and want to watch BBC iPlayer content then they can also relay your connection via U.K. servers.  Pretty cool.