How to Listen to TMS Abroad

This post was written a few years ago (in fact just after the 5-0 Ashes defeat if you can remember that!) but it always gets lots of visits every time there’s a test match or a big cricket tournament.  Anyway if you’ve reached this page before some big cricket or sporting event and you want to listen to Test Match Special abroad. Perhaps you just want to watch using a BT Sports subscription or just enjoy the highlights on Channel 4 from outside the UK then it’s all explained below..

If you just want a quick solution for listening to BBC radio on a computer or laptop you can grab a trial subscription for Identity Cloaker – the 10 day Trial is enough to listen to TMS abroad  for the test matches and it doesn’t auto-renew or anything sneaky.  If it works well for you then simply extend your subscription or grab another trial.

If you want to listen to BBC Radio on another device like a tablet or smart phone then you will probably find NordVPN is easier to use. They have versions for the majority of devices which are simple to install.  It is very cheap but only if you invest in the longer subscriptions, they do have a money back guarantee though.

Listen to TMS Overseas

There are some things which make Summer complete for me, and one of those is listening to the unique sound of Test Match Special on a hot, sunny day. Obviously this isn’t always the case, sometimes it involves cringing as you listen to a calamitous  England batting collapse or CMJ and Jonathan Agnew trying to while away a few hours talking about pigeons and cakes whilst the covers are installed for the third time in a day.

If you’ve been brought up on TMS and BBC sport though it’s difficult to enjoy the cricket any other way – even Sky subscribers I know will turn down the volume and listen to the radio commentary whilst watching on screen. Unfortunately some of the very best matches like the Ashes for example always seem to clash with my summer holidays and you’ll find the radio broadcast difficult to get from outside the UK.

This came as a bit of a surprise to me, I’d always presumed that although the BBC restricted access to it’s TV programmes online the radio was completely unfiltered however this isn’t the case.  I’m not sure to what extent but any radio sports programme that contains live coverage doesn’t seem to work when you’re outside the UK.

This includes all the local radio broadcasts which cover football matches too and of course trying to access TMS from the BBC web site is also a non-starter.

The reason I presume to copyright issues, and it’s basically the same situation as the BBC TV programmes which you can’t watch live or via iPlayer from anywhere outside the UK without a British IP address.

How You Can Listen to BBC Test Match Special Abroad

That’s all that is needed, it’s relatively simple to listen to the Test Match Special broadcast online from anywhere in the world.  You just need to hide your IP address and hence your location by using an intermediary server.  Now I should point out here that proxies although sufficient for BBC TV programmes won’t work with live broadcasts either for TV or radio shows – you’ll need a VPN service like Identity Cloaker.

All you need to do on a computer is fire up Identity Cloaker, select a UK based server from the list and then go to the BBC website.  Instead of seeing the International version of the BBC site, you’ll get access to the UK version and what is more when  you navigate to the broadcast links like TMS they’ll work without problems.  So any UK TV and radio stations will be accessible including of course the ability to listen to Test Match Special Abroad.

This method will work for your laptop or PC, but although you can use Identity Cloaker on other devices you’ll have to use a slightly different method.  Here’s the way you can set up the VPN on your iPad using exactly  the same account, it also works with Android devices too in much the same way.