Most panel TVs now have sat tuners but the performance of the boxes is superior and can come -why wouldn’t you?- with big hard drives, ‘intelligent’ EPGs that will record a series with two button presses, suggest similar programmes, pause live TV/time-shift.
It’s the capabilities of these boxes that have transformed telly viewing from what the broadcasters are putting out at the time to whatever you want to watch, whenever you want to watch it.
The important bit is the UK spot-beam which has a footprint covering about half of France for reception with a 60cm dish, only the northern 1/5 or so of the country can officially get away with a mini-dish.
I’ve not used the commercial VPNs (I have a DIY VPN solution), I guess the problem is that they are easy enough to use on a computer but not as easy to set up so that a smart TV uses the VPN for TV services, in this case one of the services which fiddles with DNS to make the VPN a bit more transparent/easy to set-up would probably be preferable.
You can plug an external USB drive into someTVs - certainly our Samsung can do this - for pausing live TV, and catch-up services mean that recording things is less necessary than it used to be.
Unfortunately, however, Roger Waters’ observation about TV in 1979 remains true (but more so).
There certainly has been a change in viewing habits which has often removed the element of discussion the morning after at work/school “Did you see…”. Just an observation.
A few years ago my parents tried to convince me that their Humax box was fantastic - the UI was appalling and not a patch on Sky… They have since moved to Sky.
Not so. According to this map Our Coverage | SES a 60cm dish will do for all of France and a great deal more besides. However, the rest of PF’s statement is correct.
But the 60cm contour line shown for dish diam for France is pretty optimistic, I’d say. 80cms in a good reception area, 100 cms will do for most. Down here in Valencia is got to be 124cms and more - but given line of sight, they do pull in the signal.
Local conditions make a lot of difference, from a tree in the way to whole mountain ranges. If you’re tucked into the ‘shadow’ side of a steep or wooded valley you may not get a signal at all, even as close to UK as Normandy.
S’funny. I’ve never before seen mention of people move that way. Only t’other way round. My Humax UI is … fantastic! And it’s true to say I have a problem with Mr Murdoch. I will never knowingly put a penny in his pocket.
But isn’t that subject to the same “Gotcha!” problems of just going straight via a VPN? I bought a router loaded with ‘Tomato’ to go this way but the whole thing made my head hurt so I bought a 125cm dish …
Trouble is, it won’t fit in the lift in my building and I need someone to help me up the 5 flights to the roof terrace!
Except that it is specifically the UK spot beam which carries UK content. See here for the list - note all the Freesat stuff is on the UK spotbeam, not on the whole-Europe beams. If you are talking about Sky, rather than Freesat I think you have a point as they use the European beam - but even then I think that you still need to pick up the spot beam as Sky actually rely on it to carry BBC etc to their UK customers.
No, as I have a fixed IP address at home (in fact I have a block of 32 IPv4 addresses) I run the server end of the VPN at home - the BBC sees my iPlayer access coming from the exact same IP address as when I am watching at home. More to the point they only see my account from that IP address as one of the things that alerts the beeb to VPN use is seeing multiple connections/accounts accessing from a small group of IPs.
Oh, and I have it set up so that the TV routes through the VPN, but the rest of the network goes direct.
We are in 83 and gave up U.K. TV a few years ago as the Satelite footprint shrank and we decided against a huge dish in our tiny garden
Netflix and Amazon prime provide enough entertainment and there are a number of French apps that can throw FRENCH TV channels from an iPad to a TV equipped with a Google Chromecast.
I guess it’s very location- dependent. The TV maestro for our area - Valencia province - states that “the UK beam can still be received with a dish as small [sic] as 100 x 120 cms with 125-135cms recommended.”
Other areas have probs and are stuck with Sky only.
I like the sound of rumblings that the Beeb are considering going subscription. I’m sure that if the Gov didn’t have any doings with the BBC it would have gone that way years ago. A sub, with some sort of encoding to make sure overseas viewers were paid up - I’d go for that.
So, 80cm as a starting point with the distinct possibility that 1m or 1.2m will be needed in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques is not unreasonable?
They’ve persistently denied wanting to ditch the licence fee and switch to a subscription model - but it’s always possible they might try to monetise the catch-up service.
I don’t think that even a subscription model would help for those outside the UK - it’s not just that they are not paying the licence fee - it is also that when the BBC buys in content the licence for that content will be for UK transmission only.
There’s always Tor, if you don’t mind switching circuits occasionally to get an exit point that isn’t geoblocked.
That’s true. But if they introduced a sub for ex-UK viewers they could afford to pay a bit more for ‘UK and overseas subscribers’. I would have thought the content suppliers would like that.
They might - but I’m not sure that the economics would work. The size of the audience isn’t overly large (estimates vary but let’s say 2 million max in Europe), spread thinly, and probably not all will be interested - why even bother to offer the BBC the content for EU consumption against, say, Sky.
