Two Best VPNs That Work with BBC iPlayer

Over the last fifteen years or so I have used, tested (and quite often broken) many. many VPN services.  In fact over that time I’ve tried nearly every major VPN service that’s been on the market, at one point I had fourteen valid subscriptions running concurrently!   So I think I’m fairly well placed to answer this question that I received in my email this morning – so what is the best VPN for BBC iPlayer  in 2023?

Now there’s many different aspects of a VPN which are important especially if you’re concerned about privacy and security.  However if the only reason you’re using a Virtual Private Network is to stream Eastenders and enjoy Match of the Day on a Saturday night, some of these are not really that important.

VPN Checklist for the BBC

So if we’re considering the essential elements for accessing BBC iPlayer then what is important ?

Here’s a brief list –

• Speed – watching a video over a slow connection is painful.  It usually ends up with buffering every few minutes, an experience which will notch up that blood pressure every time it happens.  Basically watching any media stream over a connection that is too slow is completely and utterly pointless.   This is one of the main reasons where the very few ‘free options’ like Hotspot Shield are not worth using.
• Security – now I’ve suggested that security is not an essential requirement for streaming from a media site but that’s not entirely true.  Although the level of encryption and the ability to operate split tunnelling is not really important for watching TV, the connection itself has to be secure and private.  A badly configured and insecure VPN connection will just not work, your real location will be detected and no BBC or most other media sites.
• IP Address – most VPNs nowadays offer hundreds of different servers and IP addresses.  Some even offer thousand of server locations spread across the world, but for BBC iPlayer only the UK addresses are important.  Although quantity is an issue to some extent, quality is equally as important.  If you connect to a VPN server using a single IP address shared by thousands, it’s going to get blocked by the BBC iPlayer site for all manner of reasons.  This is the single biggest reason that many VPNs don’t work with BBC iPlayer anymore – blacklisted IP addresses.
• Support for Multiple Devices – now this won’t be as important for everyone.  I for example rarely watch the BBC on anything other than a computer or laptop plugged into my TV.  However I know lots who watch primarily on their smart phones or games consoles so this is possibly an important factor for you.  There’s only a few of the major VPN services who provide applications specifically for other devices, others usually use workarounds or manual setups.  Although these can work ok they won’t be quite as user friendly or have different usability features built it.

So those are really the important criteria in my opinion, and definitely the first three because your VPN won’t let you watch the BBC without them.  Almost every VPN provider pretends to support these features, yet this isn’t always true.  There’s lots of companies who say they will support BBC iPlayer  or ITV Hub access but actually make no real effort to ensure this is maintained.  It does actually take quite a lot of work, switching IP addresses, ensuring the number of concurrent connections to the BBC site doesn’t go to high.

There’s also an issue that many of the best secure VPNs are focussed on privacy, none of them keep logs, monitor use etc.  However some ‘hands on’ connection monitoring is definitely required to ensure that BBC iPlayer keeps working.  There is fine line though from anonymous monitoring of access to a specific site and keeping records of what your VPN users are doing.  I’ve often been told by several VPN companies that they can’t guarantee access to BBC iPlayer for privacy related reasons such as this.

Choosing the Best VPNS for BBC iPlayer Access

We’ve all seen those VPN review sites which offer an insight into which are the ‘best VPNs’ unfortunately 90% of these are just copies of each other designed to flood the search engine results.    To be fair the best VPN companies do provide a pretty robust product which will protect your privacy and secure your data.  However this isn’t the same as picking a BBC iPlayer VPN or the best one for accessing other streaming services.  Indeed some excellent VPNs don’t work at all with the BBC iPlayer normally because they’re being routed through overused datacentre IP addresses.  Whole ranges of these IP addresses are already blocked by the BBC, so any VPN connection using them will never, ever work until this block is removed.

So rating a great VPN that won’t work with the BBC iPlayer is of limited use if you just want to watch Eastenders, or catch up with the latest global disasters on the BBC News.

Unfortunately none of the actual providers can advertise much information about accessing BBC iPlayer or indeed any geo targeting benefits.  This is because if they start boasting about such things, they quickly become a target themselves.

Several VPN providers who openly promoted the ability to access the BBC from anywhere in the world, simply got shut down.   Some of them were even stupid enough to use BBC logos and graphics on their websites advertising the functionality.  Needless to say the numerous legal firms who were employed by the BBC were kept very busy sending out legal threats and copyright infringement claims.   Most of them just closed down quietly as it’s wasn’t worth the risk continuing once on their radar.

So whichever VPN company you do decide on, remember there’s never going to be much information on the companies websites about it being an iPlayer VPN.  If there is then it almost certainly won’t work for long.

Which VPNS do I Use for BBC iPlayer

Ok for the last few months, being able to access BBC iPlayer has not really been a problem for me. Just like everyone else, travel has been off the table and so stuck in the UK it of course works flawlessly. However as I mentioned for more than a decade I’ve been lucky to travel a lot and live abroad for much of the year, a VPN for watching the BBC has become pretty much a necessity !

So which VPNs do I actually use out of my many subscriptions?  Well there’s two which I use all the time, because I know they work and don’t cost a lot – here they are –

Identity Cloaker – the first VPN I started using regularly and have has a subscription for many, many years.   It was one of the first commercially available VPN systems you could buy for personal use.  It’s software was pretty ground breaking in it’s time and over the years it’s become extremely stable and reliable.  The website looks a little dated and old fashioned, I don’t think it’s even changed in about 12 years.  The owner who I actually now know purely from being a long time customer, spends all his time tweaking and maintaining the servers but doesn’t really bother with promoting his software much.

The Identity Cloaker technical team are very aware that a huge amount of customers use Identity Cloaker for one reason only – to watch UK Television (and BBC in particular).  They spend a lot of their time (and money) maintaining this connection and ensuring it works all the time.  Very occasionally a particular IP address will get blocked, but it won’t be for long and all the other servers will work anyway.   This really goes on behind the scenes, they are very careful to not mention it on the website or advertising(not that they do much!).

The drawbacks with Identity Cloaker are the software is really focussed on Windows computers, there is a MAC version though I’m not sure how well that works.   There are no applications for smart phones, tablets etc so you have to set up the VPN connection manually.  It’s not very difficult to do, but not having any application to control access makes it a little more fiddly to use on these devices.

If you want reliability and intend to use on a computer/laptop then it’s certainly one of the very best VPNs for BBC iPlayer.

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NordVPN – now this company can get some bad press although to be fair a lot of it’s unjustified.  The company has a very aggressive marketing strategy and a huge customer base, it certainly dwarfs the size of Identity Cloaker!  You can get incredibly cheap deals for NordVPN but only for the longer subscriptions of two or three years.  To get a short, month long subscription to NordVPN is more expensive (pro rata at least) however it’s probably worth doing this for a month first to try out.

Nord has a huge support and development team and you can see that in their software.  The PC version is always being updated and has loads of security features and is very simple to use.  It also has great versions for just about every device, the smart phone versions I use on iOS and Android are just as good as the PC version.  Simple to use and you can get a UK IP address really quickly just by clicking a button.

Nord also has an enormous server network spread out across 59 different countries, which means there are thousands of available IP addresses.  To be honest although this looks impressive, I rarely use any of them after all why would I want to route through a Singapore server or one in Moscow ! For others this might be useful, but to access BBC iPlayer it’s no use whatsoever.  For the BBC it’s only the UK servers that are important – so how does it work with streaming Match of the Day on Saturday night!

This is where NordVPN gets a lot of complaints, simply because it has a massive user base and thousands of people will use it to watch the BBC.  Unfortunately if you get too many concurrent connections, that IP address will get blocked and quickly.  This happens with a lot of Nord VPN addresses particularly the super fast ones.  One of the problems is that the ‘default connection’ method is to use something called auto connect.  You just click a country and Nord finds the best, fastest VPN server available.

NordVPN BBC iPlayer Servers

This would be great but it’s rubbish at getting a server which works with BBC iPlayer – I presume because these fast servers get assigned to lots of people all wanting to watch the BBC.  Which means that often your connection will get blocked by the BBC, and why loads of people insist that NordVPN doesn’t work with the BBC!

However it’s not true, they simply have too many users all on the same addresses. However NordVPN actually do keep a range of servers carefully monitored to access the BBC which work great. They rotate the IP addresses assigned to the below servers in order to keep them working with the BBC,

# 1840-1847, 1850-1863, 1865, 1869, 1873, 1875-1878, 1880-1881, 1900-1901, 1903-1904, 1911, 1913, 1917, 1919-1920

If you use these the reliability with watching the BBC skyrockets and they work all the time. However many people carry on using the auto connect feature and get frustrated when it doesn’t work.  In fact manually choosing a few servers to connect to and saving to your favourites works fine too, as you’re moving away from those auto servers.

In truth NordVPN is not quite as reliable as accessing the BBC than Identity Cloaker simply because it’s so hard  to keep track of the huge volume of users they have.  However it does work fine when you use the right servers and only very occasionally do I have to try more than twice to connect.  If you want to use on other devices though and want a decent low cost VPN that supports these and works with BBC iPlayer then NordVPN could be for you.