Want to watch BBC iPlayer in China in 2020? BBC iPlayer is not even available in Ireland, which is a few minutes from the UK. That doesn’t mean that you can’t watch it there nor that you can’t watch BBC iPlayer in China. You can. Except, it’s slightly harder in China.
Firstly let’s talk about why you can’t currently watch BBC iPlayer in China...
BBC claims that because you aren’t paying for the TV license in the UK, you can’t watch BBC iPlayer outside of the UK.
That reason is very flawed, though.
After all, what if you do pay the TV license in the UK, but you just travel a lot?
The real reason why you can’t watch BBC iPlayer in places like China?
That BBC pays for rights to show some of the content it shows and that some of the content it owns, it gives rights for, in other countries, in exchange for money.
As a result, BBC iPlayer can’s show a lot of its content outside of the UK, and since it’s created for the UK audience, naturally, it does not make sense for BBC to pay money to show content in other countries.
Luckily unblocking BBC iPlayer in China isn’t that hard, although harder than in the likes of European countries.
To unblock BBC iPlayer in China, like in other countries, you need a VPN.
VPN services? They allow you to switch the location of your device, virtually.
You can be in China but look like someone that’s in the UK.
That’s not the entire story yet, though.
For BBC iPlayer to work in China, you need a VPN that has servers that work with BBC iPlayer.
A UK server by itself does not guarantee that BBC iPlayer will work.
Why?
As BBC, like many other platforms, takes measures to prevent VPN users from outside of supported regions from accessing.
That’s because they have to.
If they give rights to other companies to show certain in certain countries, but make it easy to watch that same content in those certain countries with their app, they could get in trouble.
That’s why most VPN services don’t unblock entertainment services.
Oh, and then there’s also the issue that VPN services are blocked by the Chinese government.
And that’s because VPN services are quite easy to block as they are very detectable as VPN services.
As a result, China can prevent them from working.
Solution? Stealth VPN.
This feature, while it slows down your internet speed, results in a VPN blending in with normal traffic, making you undetectable to China, resulting in a VPN service working.
PrivateVPN? It offers both a BBC iPlayer server as well as Stealth VPN while also coming with a 7-day trial that doesn’t ask for any payment methods so you can try out BBC iPlayer in China in 2020, fully risk-free.
Apart from that, PrivateVPN also offers 2048-bit Encryption with AES-256, which is the highest grade encryption on the market, while also being the best budget VPN provider as chosen by the prestigious VPN site, VPNmentor.
Just create an account, download the app, and you are good to go.
If you are using an Android device, you can just download the app from our site. On Apple devices? You will need to change the location of your Apple App Store to be outside of China.
For that, you need to sign out of your iCloud account followed by creating a new one, while selecting that you are outside of China, while connected to a VPN.
Not quite.
See, while BBC iPlayer is overall free, you need to create a BBC iPlayer account where you also confirm that you pay a TV license by ticking a box. If you do, you will be let in.
And that will allow you to unblock BBC iPlayer in China.
...Meanwhile, the use of PrivateVPN will allow you to unblock many more blocked services in China, whether that’s American Netflix or simply blocked social media.
Written by Michael Smolski.
Disclaimer: While PrivateVPN has been supporting BBC iPlayer for years, due to the nature of BBC always trying to break down VPN services from working, PrivateVPN cannot guarantee that its servers will work non-stop with BBC iPlayer, at all given times.