Bedrock

I won’t say it hasn’t been a struggle but as of today I’ve just about cracked the TV thing with one exception.

If you’re not a frequent visitor to Spain you may not know that SKY and the BBC do not like you watching their stuff when you are abroad – this is indeed being fought as I understand by the EU as it is highly uncompetitive – and as someone who pays the TV licence and pays for a Sky subscription – I find the restrictions utterly unacceptable.

Right now the only thing I have not cracked is Sky on demand (well, sort of) – so if you have a SKY HD box they’re not about to let you record on-demand stuff as you did in the UK – I’m still working on that.

VPNs are a way around most of the issues – but you need a fast VPN to the UK and this tends to slow down access to other stuff – so I’m using a service recommended by a neighbour of ours called Unblock-Us. In UK terms it’s around £3 a month – and so the way it works is you make a minor update to your router (DNS settings) and those services that need it – iPlayer and Sky – go through that and are handled as if you were in the UK – other services go un-affected. No setup on individual PCs etc.

Also I have a Now-TV box here and that too works thanks to Unblock-Us. The good part about that is that it is relatively easy to unlock that box into what it really is – a Roku media server – so with the addition of PLEX on my PC and on the Now TV box not only can we access our media here – but also on the phone anywhere – remembering that THREE now include data with roaming accounts – such as Spain and the USA. Now I have PLEX operating – I’m looking to see what other goodies the Roku system has to offer.

Sky Go also works using this system and so with a decent tablet, SKY options are now much wider. I’d still like to crack getting the Sky broadband downloading working – it’s likely on a Port that the American company doing Unblock-US are unaware of. 

So all in all a step change from where we were weeks ago. All we need now is a decent TV a

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