Brits living abroad usually pine for something from home, often a specific consumable such as Marmite, pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch, Earl Grey tea or a favourite marmalade. Aussies will kill for the last jar of Vegemite, a pale imitation of the real McCoy, even if the canny Kiwi’s have better taste and export an antipodean Marmite to Australia in a bid to re-educate their palates.

It’s the same with TV shows. Dr Who and Torchwood, for example, have fans around the world who are itching to see the latest series as soon as possible, even if the BBC will show them locally eventually. So why have the BBC restricted iPlayer access to only UK-based viewers?

It’s not as if it is impossible to get round this restriction. Slingbox and CyTV can re-transmit live TV anywhere the Internet reaches, ignoring any cross-border copyright restrictions. Even the advertisements look interesting in a different language and some are far more racy than the staid UK and US ones.

Mike loves Nigella
As one ex-pat living in America has told me: “My American pal Mike loves the British adverts. If he sees an ad. for Marmite/Tescos/Nigela Lawson, he’s going to take far more note than a Brit because it’s for something exotic and foreign to him. But if he sees an ad. for HSBC international banking, which they usually show to us ‘international viewers’, Mike is going to ignore it. If we are tuning in to watch something British try and sell us something British – not banking, they have that in the US already.”

Considering the damage US banks have done to the world’s credit supply that may be a moot point and only the most hardened Anglophile can watch Nigela’s ads and find them interesting but it does raise the point that advertisers and the BBC et al are missing a trick. With increasing globalisation of products and on-line shopping, surely they would make a killing on international ad-revenue?

Proxy manager gets round poxy management
To hammer home the point the ex-pat above has written a little proxy server manager for Mac OSX. Although still at the beta stage, with a click or two it will fool any restrictions that services such as BBC’s iPlayer, ITV’s F1 live videos, NBC and Fox in the US have on the whereabouts of viewers. By using a proxy server and hiding their real IP address, viewers can appear as if in the country of the host site. Being a simple on-off toggle that only switches preferences in Safari and the Network control panel it is quite safe to use and easy to set up.

The proxy server manager is currently only available on request via this blog page. Please send an email address for the 610k zip archive to be forwarded to.