This morning I responded to a thread that was posted here asking how to access the BBC iPlayer from a Foxsat HDR in Spain but now I can find neither my post nor the thread itself. I spent a long time searching as I thought at first that I must have made a mistake about which sub-forum it was posted in. However it seems to have totally disappeared.

So is it a bug in the forum? or was it deleted for some reason? or deleted accidentally? Any ideas?

Looks like its been deleted.

Any speculation as to the reason? I can't imagine why on earth would it be deleted especially without any explanation or PM to the authors.

Could it just be because it would be classed as an illegal activity? Do people in Spain pay a UK TV licence?

I think that I may have contributed to it being pulled as I asked some questions about how to change IP addresses to UK ones for people living overseas. I apologise to the forum in this case, I did not realise that this was against the rules for posting.
Changing to a proxy IP is not illegal, nor is receiving data that has been 'geo-IP'd' outside of the intended zone. The comments made about the licence fee are moral rather than legal: I am sure that the originator of this thread, domiciled in Spain, is paying a Spanish licence fee and probably not watching much, if any, Spanish TV. Furthermore I am sure most ex-pats would be willing to contribute to the UK licence fee if there was a mechanism to do so.
The reasons for such regional restrictions are very understandable & valid: sports contracts & perfomers' rights issues would be impossibly expensive for a pan-European audience. But on the other hand, there will always be a small percentage of expats who want to receive transmissions that are outside of the 'official' zone. For some companies this is not an issue (no problem getting Polish stations in the UK via PolSat), but for higher profile broadcasters like the BBC it comes down to a balancing act between the need to negotiate zone-limited contracts and their willingness to turn a blind eye to a few expats. I believe expats are rightfully justified in attempting to access these services as long as their actions remain legal, and therefore a forum such as this one is a useful platform on which to discuss the legal means of doing so.

Of course it's not illegal.

It's certainly not illegal. The TV license is not a subscription to watch the BBC it's a tax on the use of equipment capable of receiving a TV signal in the UK. I live in France & pay a French TV license. I don't need a UK TV licence.

Th e French TV license is collected by requiring you to declare on your income tax return if you do not have a TV set otherwise it's added to your tax bill by default. It's of course a far more serious offence to make a false declaration to the tax authorities than merely to 'forget' to pay your TV license.

So to return to the question that I posed in the previous thread. When using the BBC iPlayer on a computer it's a simple & perfectly legal matter to use a proxy server & thus appear as though one has a UK IP address but how would one do this with the Foxsat HDR? I imagine that one would have to set up a connection to the proxy service on a computer & then have the iPlayer on the Humax box somehow route through that computer with the 'UK' IP address.

I've been advised to try the following:

1) Obtain access to/set up a VPN (Virtual Private Network) in the UK (either through the workplace or via a different provider) which is perfectly legal.

2) Either (a) buy a Draytek Vigor modem/router which can make use of this VPN directly or (b) configure my Internet connection on my PC to use this VPN and then connect the Foxsat HDR to the PC and enable "Internet Connection Sharing" which is detailed on Microsoft's website for those using Windows. The downside of this of course is that the PC must be on in order to be able to watch iPlayer content on the Foxsat HDR.

I intend to try this at the weekend as iPlayer through my VPN works fine on the PC so far.

From our community guidelines:


As such, this thread has been closed.