Watching TV abroad on Ipad

[lydiamight]

Another vote for the FilmOn app for Ipads.
With 120 channels out of which 13 are UK TV stations, plus BBC news you should be able to find something worth watching.
Worked fine for me when we were on a touring holiday in India. We were using the hotel's wifi connection so I'm not sure how it would be on 3G.

[BrendanS]

I have already discovered our 3G is better than the pitiful WiFi in the Marina so am relaxed we have the capacity to receive the programme

Watching tv or streaming video of any sort, uses a lot of bandwidth, so unless you have a 3G data plan with unlimited data, check you actually have enough monthly allowance to watch tv , and that you don't incur huge costs for going over your monthly allowance.

[yesod]

How reliable is the VPN using 3g? I use a VPN for work when remote from the office, and it regularly drops out, worse when using my phone card. I could imagine this being really frustrating if trying to view something.

is your problem the 3g part, or your it department just specced a dodgy vpn headend? i just dropped my vpn after 57hours online over 3g, including a bit of video streaming and voice conferencing.

[rafiki_]

is your problem the 3g part, or your it department just specced a dodgy vpn headend? i just dropped my vpn after 57hours online over 3g, including a bit of video streaming and voice conferencing.

I don't think the VPN is dodgy, but it does seem to require a reasonable bandwidth to operate reliably.

[Jetstream]

Both my wife and i spend far to much time abroad with work. We have a subsription with witopia.net. This vpn for the ipad is simple to install

The ip addresss is then in the uk (or usa if you specify)

Because we then have a uk adresss, iplayer nd itv player etc work just fine abroad (alledgedly)

There are cheaper workrounds, but witopia for ipad seems to be the most robust. You can have three devices on one subscription

If you have a laptop (pc) then I have heard expatshield works well for free, but you do get a lot of adverts

Enjoy

[fireball]

How reliable is the VPN using 3g? I use a VPN for work when remote from the office, and it regularly drops out, worse when using my phone card. I could imagine this being really frustrating if trying to view something.

I've not needed to use the VPN for streaming - only for remote support - the dropout for us is related to the use (or lack of in a given time) and signal strength on the device (iPhone) ... this is running through business ADSL and low grade end units.

Viewing video over VPN can be a little difficult if the viewer isn't caching the data very well or the speed of the link isn't fast enough - and its the slowest part of the link that is the issue. In my case, using work VPN would mean that the fastest connection I could achieve would be the 1Mb upload available from our ADSL - and that assumes the rest of the links are faster ... it should be enough to stream video (just) but there is often a delay due to other users on the line.

[kid's inheritance]

Thank you for the advice, Slingbox works as promised
Regards
Rob

[mikef]

I've used it all over the world but be careful with data costs on 3G. It cost me £35 just to watch a penalty shoot out once!

That would be my concern too. My 3G data limit is 5Gb per month and I use most of that just e-mailing and doing a bit of net surfing in 2-3 wks on the boat. I can imagine that a few hours TV would put me over my limit v quickly and that could be costly. Anyone know how many Mb an hour's worth of TV uses?

[kid's inheritance]

If the wifi is still as bad as it was on our last visit, I will know next week as we are off on Friday
Rob

[mjf]

I think mikef its 1gb / hr

I am not a geek on this stuff but when I watch TV through a dongle that seems to be the amount built up on the time/mb used recorder for that particular month.

I think iphones use less as do ipads as sceens smaller or something like that


I would not 3G TV overseas before checking the cost as because as you say I have have some big bills with biz data files / attachments over the years