Watching RTE from Outside Ireland
The public service broadcaster for Ireland is known as RTE, which stands for Raidi Teilifs Ireann. They are actually one of the oldest public broadcasters anywhere, operating from 1961. The Irish Government appoint a board to run the station, it is very near to Irelands version of the BBC.
It is certainly why it is missed by Irish citizens who move from home, and why many were so pleased at the announcement of RTE Player which is a similar version of BBC Iplayer. Which will let you watch RTE over the internet. Alas all the homesick Irish were to be disappointed when they tried to access the RTE Player from abroad, the dreaded Geotargeting stopped them.
Now some of you are probably not aware of this term, but ‘geotargeting’ plays an important part on what you access online. The most obvious example is when you go to Google, you will always be directed to the Google Home page related to your location e.g Google.com, Google.co.uk, Google.IE.
Makes sense in this example yet unfortunately geotargeting is mainly used to block access. The process is fairly simple, everyone using the internet has IP address anyway. This IP address is registered and can be traced to a physical location, so all a web site has to do is look up the location of this address from a database and it can determine where you are.
This is what RTE Player does, it looks up your IP address and if it’s not registered in Ireland you won’t be able to access the content. It’s the same with BBC Iplayer, if you’re a non-UK surfer then you’ll get blocked from Iplayer. If you want to see how I did it – try here, on my US RTE post.
Fortunately there is a workaround to access the content. So for RTE player all you need to do is connect through an Irish Proxy server. When you connect throught the Irish proxy your IP address will be listed is Irish and RTE Player will work perfectly.
It’s perfectly simple to do, the trouble is find a proxy to use which is why I generally use a commercial one as they are fast and secure.
