I’m a BBC licence holder and live in France. I don’t have a VPN, but watch BBC, ITV and other UK programmes, with a satellite dish.
All legal and above board.
@Pam you’ve jumped onto a thread which has been silent for 8 years… 
EDIT: but glad to hear you are (legally ) receiving whatever TV you want. That’s good news.
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…but how come? You cannot hold a UK TV licence via a non-UK address.
If you happen to pay for for a licence in your name held via a UK address of a friend or relative that still doesn’t cover your use of BBC services outside the UK i.e. it still doesn’t make your use of satellite reception (or a VPN)…
I’m not calling you out, as I use both satellite & a VPN to view UK TV content.
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Badger
Would you mind telling me which VPN you use? Our syndic is having the roof on our building replaced early next year and no doubt our satellite dish will be temporarily affected.
So I’m looking for a VPN that works for BBC iPlayer and maybe the catchup services for ITV etc.
Thanks in advance.
Certainly; it’s Nord VPN. They have a deal on at the moment I see (but that’s fairly normal).
https://nordvpn.com/fr/
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Brilliant. Thanks very much.
I use NordVPN as well and it does works very well. They did have issues a good while ago where you had to swap servers every week or two and that prompted me to switch to ExpressVPN but these seem to be fixed now. I haven’t had iPlayer, or any of the other players stop working for over 18 months now.
I think that if you sign up, and say @Badger recommended you, he can get an extra 3 months free. You’ll need to look it up, or maybe Badger needs to. I may also be wrong 
I’m not wrong 
Thanks Hairbear.
I don’t need it just yet but it’s good to have this option if our dish goes kaput when they start work on the roof.
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It’s different here in the UK, which is why I don’t have a TV licence.
Yep, back in UK the TV was only used for showing training videos, no outside links at all… thus no licence was necessary.
You can even use it for “outside links”, such as Netflix, without a licence.
ah, I’m talking about in UK, when such things didn’t exist… somewhere around the ice-age
It should be remembered that this thread is 8 years old… and things in whichever country have possibly/probably changed in that time.
Note that what @Stella said in 2017 is no longer true. The TV license was abolished in France in 2022.
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I’m with Surf Shark. Works great for BBC, ITV & Channel 4 (with the exception of the Channel 4 app on one particular device… But I think that’s due to that device as it works fine on others).
Costs me €70 for 2 years, plus they gave me an extra 3 months on top so I make that about €2,50 per month.
Thanks Gareth.
Are these VPN contracts easy to terminate when you’re done? I have a weird horror of being locked into subscriptions.
I use NordVPN. It’s working so far (I’ve kept on the BBC licence).
Has this actually been tested in court? I should know the answer to this since it’s kinda my business, but I don’t actually. Virtually all the streamers do live events these days which should put these kinds of arguments on very shaky ground. I’m not sure whether you could get away with saying you watch nothing live on Netflix just as you can’t say you never watch live shows on ITVX. Maybe I’ll do some research…
I don’t know as I’ve not tried to cancel one yet… But my bank card expires before my VPN contract ends so they won’t be able to bill me even if they tried.
I’ll let you know in 2027 how I get on 
This is why most of my life goes on virtual cards these days. Knowing you can just press a button and the card’s gone is an absolute godsend. Even stuff like supermarket shopping goes on one. Thankfully I’ve never had an issue with refunds so far, which was my only concern about using them.
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