If you’re asking the question – is there a way to stream ITV abroad for free I’m afraid you’re in for a disappointment. If you’re grown up, you’ve surely learnt this life lesson – nothing in life is free, there’s always a cost however it’s not always paid in money.
Just to summarise the issue, the ITV Hub has all the ITV channels streaming live plus a huge archive of older programmes. It used to be a bit rubbish but in the last couple of years it’s had some serious upgrades and is a wonderful source of entertainment. It all works perfectly from the UK but if you try and access from outside the UK you get a message like this
Like just about every decent multimedia site on the internet, the ITV HUB checks you IP address when you try and connect and will only allow you access if you’re in it’s domestic market i.e the UK. The fix is to hide your IP address and hence your location by using something called a VPN to connect through. The ITV site will detect the location of the VPN server instead of yours and as long as it’s in the UK it will allow you access, forget proxies they stopped working a couple of years ago.
This is why literally hundreds of thousands of people use these VPN services so they can watch things like Coronation Street abroad, or access the BBC iPlayer from anywhere in the world. So back to the question – is there a free VPN to allow me to stream ITV abroad?
It’s important to remember that these VPN services are actually expensive to run, the hardware needs to be fast, you need a modern datacenter to house them, the bandwidth costs money plus you need technical staff to set up and support the servers. So why would anyone pay money in order to supply a free service to allow them to watch ITV from abroad?
Of course, they won’t it’s simply not going to happen. No random stranger is going to spend thousands every month just so you can watch Coronation Street from the Costa Del Sol. That cost has to be recouped in some way and let be honest a profit needs to be made otherwise why bother?
There are three options which are used to finance these VPN services and they are as follows:
- Subscription service – pay every month for using the VPN.
- Advertising Model – adverts and click-bait inserted into your browsing sessions to make money.
- Bandwidth Sharing – company uses your connection in order to host a premium service i.e share your internet connection with paid users.
That pretty much covers the options and of course the second two could technically be called ‘free’ in that you don’t hand over any money. Most companies use the subscription model and you can find loads of these online but there are several that offer the other two options. I would strongly advise not using the third option as it involves complete strangers using your internet connection for their anonymity. Which means that anything they do online is traced back to your IP address – this could potentially cause you huge problems as well as being extremely insecure.
The ‘free models’ are usually offered by companies alongside a ‘premium’ version without the advertising or bandwidth sharing. It’s sometimes difficult to tell what you are signing up to with these free versions so check the small print before you use them.
Although it costs money, the subscription services are much safer and have other advantages too. They are generally much quicker and more secure as they are not overloaded with ‘free users’ who swamp the servers.
Our favorite and fastest VPN service is called Identity Cloaker and you can get a discount on a subscription below. It works with all the UK TV stations like BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub etc plus is one of the few VPNs that can access US Netflix too if that’s of interest.
Here’s the Code – 3E9E264B you just add it to the coupon section to get the discount – here