How can you watch TV from home while in Spain?

Have you just moved to Spain and miss your country, or have you been living here a long time, but want to be more up to date with the news from back home and watch your favourite TV shows? Well, the solution is to watch the English-language TV channels directly in your Spanish home on your Spanish television. So, how do you do it?

Satellite TV

Satellite reception is undoubtedly the best known and most stable option on the market, but also the most expensive. You need a satellite dish, a satellite receiver and a card. Apart from that, you have to take into account that the installation of a satellite dish is not easy, and a professional will have to install it for you. That means drilling holes through the walls and having workmen at home. More than anything else, you have to have the authorisation of the community of homeowners in your block of flats or urbanización to be able to do it, and some don’t allow the installation of satellite dishes. So what other options do you have?

Websites

There are, of course, the official websites for TV channels like the BBC, Sky, ITV and CNN where you can sometimes see live content, but they may be blocked when viewed outside of the country.

An alternative to this is one of the many third-party websites that also broadcast their programmes. This is the quickest solution, although in most cases it can be quite annoying because there’s loads of advertising. You also have to be very careful because the ads that appear on these pages are often misleading and try to make you believe that you need a player, plugin or codec to watch the telly when in fact it’s not true.

Apps

There are several apps you can use to access the content of TV stations from a phone or tablet, the advantage being the added comfort and mobility. What’s more, depending on the device and the television you’ve got, you can connect it to the big screen and watch your favourite shows there. There are some disadvantages, though, because on some apps they can ask you for excessive, or even abusive, permissions, so you have to be careful with that.

VPN

Without going into too many technical details, a Virtual Private Network, or VPN for short, allows you to connect your computer to another one remotely. For example, if you are on your sofa in Spain, you can use a VPN to trick your internet connection into thinking you are in a different country. This way it will seem that you are connecting from home since the IP of your computer would be registering as from there.

To do this, you’ll have to contract the service with a VPN provider located in that country, be it the UK, Ireland, USA or elsewhere. It is one of the most reliable solutions currently available, and totally legal, although you should be aware that this service is usually paid for.

Paid websites

There are a number of streaming platforms that are available to watch the TV channels from your country, for which you have to pay a monthly fee, as with any other service. The greatest advantage of this is that there is better quality and speed without all the complications of cables and antennae to install.

There are also other options for watching your favourite TV channels, but they are technical solutions not suitable for the technologically inexperienced. These include PROXY (similar to VPN, but not recommended because it’s quite slow) and SLINGBOX (a device that has to be connected to the network of the specific house in your home country).

So you see, if you live in Spain, there are solutions so that let you still enjoy watching all your favourite TV shows – all you have to do is choose the right option for you.