So you love Football, you crave the Premiership but you’re stuck in a country which doesn’t share your interest. They all seem obsessed with different games, where you don’t even understand the rules! What can you do? Where can you keep up to date with all the football action? Well one solution may appear to be the BBC iPlayer, which streams all it’s shows live and archives them to watch later too. Sure the BBC doesn’t have as many of the bigger sports live any more, due to the ridiculous costs involved but there’s usually lots of coverage and highlight shows.
Indeed if you’re a football fan of a lower league club, then BBC radio is a veritable goldmine of entertainment. Almost every game is covered by experienced local broadcasters where you can follow your club’s progress (or lack in the case of mine!). It’s a great fix if you’re feeling a little homesick, live coverage of a dour non-league football game on a dark night in February! Ok so it’s not live TV but the radio broadcasts can be surprisingly atmospheric.
Higher up the football pyramid in the Premier League, there are other options and you can of course, get your fix from Gary Lineker. The BBC has one of the best highlight shows on TV for football and it’s called Match of the Day Streamed live on Saturday night and then usually on Sunday night too with Match of the Day 2, you can actually see every Premiership goal and many hours of coverage. They don’t get many live games apart from usually the FA Cup matches, but it’s a decent option. The solution below can also be used to gain access to live matches from Sky and BT but you’ll also need a subscription too.
So can you watch football like this, is it possible to stream MotD all over the planet?
Unfortunately this is where the good news stops, the BBC iPlayer is blocked in all countries outside the United Kingdom. It doesn’t matter who you are, or where you’re from or even if you’ve paid for a TV licence So under normal circumstances you’ll not be able to watch Match of the Day at all as soon as you leave the country.
How to Watch Match of the Day Abroad
Don’t worry though, there is a simple method to enable you to watch Match of the Day abroad – you simply need to change your IP address. It’s not difficult, and you don’t need to be a computer expert to do it. There are lots of programs known as VPN services which basically do all the work for you. You just install a simple piece of software which sits in your task bar or an app on your phone. Then by connecting to a UK based VPN server then you’ll have full access to the BBC irrespective of your location. Just watch this video demonstrating how simple it is to watch MotD online.
Just watch the video and you’ll see how easy it is –
Since this video was created, you now do have to create a BBC iPlayer account to login with. Don’t worry about this though, you just need an email account to create one. You will be asked if you have a TV license, but there are no checks on this (hint just say ‘yes’). You are also asked for your postcode, but any valid UK postcode (like a US ZIP code) will do – just pick an address of anywhere in the UK. Again the iPlayer account is only used to record your viewing preferences and suggest options you might like, so don’t worry about creating one.
Not Just MotD Live – Watch Free TV From All Over the World
In reality you’re not actually changing IP addresses but actually hiding them. The only address which is seen belongs to the VPN server, which means as long as it’s in the right country then you’ll be able to bypass any block. For example if you connect to a UK server then all the British TV channels will be accessible. These are all free so it’s brilliant for an English speaker. Switch to a US server and you can access all the US only media sites. My favorite is an online radio station called Pandora, only available to US listeners normally. You can access pretty much anything anywhere, by just clicking on the right country.
SO give it a try, by using a simple VPN service like Nord VPN you can hide your real IP address and bypass all of the UK only blocks. As soon as you do this, all of the BBC’s online resources are accessible including Match of the Day. There are eleven live channels streaming to watch on the BBC alone, plus thousands of archived shows.
Remember though the licensing rights for Match of the Day are fairly restrictive so you’ll have to be quick. You can watch live on the BBC when the show is being broadcast (usually around 10:40 PM Saturday). You can also catch it on the BBC iPlayer archive a couple of days later, but only for a maximum of seven days unlike 12 months for most other content.
Now we’ve all probably see the stories of those YouTube millionaires who prance around while millions follow them. In reality, this is probably is not suited to all of us especially those on the wrong side of 40. The reality is that when you have millions of followers it’s actually extremely easy to make money from YouTube, there’s loads of opportunities for advertising revenue and paid product placement. Getting those followers though can be very difficult and for every millionaire there are hundreds of thousands who rake in a few dollars a month from their channels.
So what’s your option if you aren’t a stunning 20 something blonde with a wacky personality and an exhibitionist streak? Well there are other ways of making money that are perhaps not as lucrative but way more predictable. You see viral is difficult to achieve, and some may say even harder to maintain. I remember several people who were all the rage a decade ago but have now faded into the annals of digital history.
The problem is that you can spend ages thinking about and creating a potential viral video but chances are it will fail. Indeed when a video goes seriously viral it’s almost always unexpected, hoped for perhaps but unexpected nonetheless. My advice is don’t try, if you have a YouTube channel aim for a certain level of quality and provide useful information. However you shouldn’t spend loads of money and effort on single videos unless you have a very flexible budget and plans on YouTube domination.
Many people who make a very good living from YouTube have learnt the hard way that the safest way to increase revenue is to keep adding videos. It’s that simple, if you keep adding videos you’re building up your potential ad revenue each time plus expanding your channel. The difficulty is that producing decent videos regularly can be hard work, unless of course you have some sort of tool.
I’ve started using something called Content Samurai which helps bypass this problem. It’s a simple program which can be used to create videos very quickly and to an extremely high standard. It was first released a year or so ago, but to be honest it was a bit basic then and I quickly got fed up of the videos it produced. However now there’s a few new features that have been added which make a huge difference to both how easy it to use and the quality of the videos.
Here’s a quick look at the program in operation – Create Videos Quickly , which you can find hosted on Youtube.
As you can see you can go from a few lines of text to a fully featured video in a few minutes. If you really went crazy then you could probably finish in a couple of minutes. Although what I like now about the new release of Content Samurai is that it’s now possible to spend a little more time and effort and really customize your presentations.
It’s true that to some extent you can spot a Content Samurai video quite easily but not all of them. There are some being produced with custom graphics, professional intros and video backgrounds that look professional quality and some. This technical video called IP address changer incorporates a brief screen cast which makes it stand out from the standard template.
The crucial fact though it to remember that you can produce lots of videos very quickly indeed and that’s it main selling point. If you get used to the software which doesn’t take long you can easily generate significant numbers of videos extremely quickly. Uploading in quantity is always a decent tactic with YouTube, some will sink, some will do ok and other videos may go viral. However you’ll never know which is which until you release them.
For the last few years, one of the hottest properties on the internet has been Instagram. It started as a simple photo sharing site but has developed into a fully fledged social network. Many people spend a large part of their lives on Instagram sharing pictures and experience. In some senses it seems to have become an alternative for younger people to Facebook. Although the premier social sharing site is still amazingly popular anyone who has kids has probably noticed that you won’t find them on the site much.
Part of this is understandable, after all unless you spend some serious time configuring your options much of what you post on Facebook is shared with everyone in your list. As you can imagine our children probably don’t want to share that much online with us, their grandparents and parents friends! One of the places they’ve sort refuge is Instagram which is far more popular among younger people than Facebook is.
The demographics of Instagram’s audience also make it pretty appealing to marketers. Combine that with the easy format of posting and even reposting images means it’s pretty accessible. You don’t need a lot of content to set up a popular account, in fact if you have the right tools you don’t really need anything at all. However it can be quite time consuming especially if you have a lot of accounts to manage. Also there are many people making an awful lot of money from Instagram in a variety of ways.
However there are a few points to remember before you start investing all this time and effort into making money out of the platform. Firstly Instagram doesn’t like marketers, especially those who operate lots of accounts and take people away from their site. Every day they instigate lots of blocks and bans plus they even delete thousands of accounts every day. So if you’re operating on Instagram on a commercial level, to sell or send directly to offers prepare to lose some of those accounts. It can be tough, watching an accounts with tens of thousands of followers disappear in a second but it can and will happen so don’t get too involved with any account.
Most successful marketers on Instagram operate on a volume basis using software and tools to create, manage and develop many accounts. If you’re trying to stay legitimate then you’re currently allowed 5 different accounts with no restrictions, if you want any more you’re going to need to hide your identity and connection. Also check what current limits are, it’s five at the moment but that could change by the time you read this.
Running multiple accounts is hard work, you won’t get far without using some software to help you. Be careful there’s lots out there but using any of them badly can get your accounts banned. It’s best to start out really slow, and learn the software while you develop your money making Instagram accounts. Going aggressive from the start will only end up in one way. The market leader for managing social networks including Instagram is called Jarvee, it also can be used to control accounts on lots of the other major platforms. There’s no doubt it’s an impressive piece of software but it does have a learning curve, try out on this link – Instagram Marketing Free Trial.
The software can be used to actively manage and promote your accounts but there is an awful lot of configuration options to be aware of. the best advice is to carefully watch the demo videos then slowly start to promote your accounts. If you’re using aged accounts with followers and something of a history then potentially you can be a little bit more aggressive, although obviously you’d have more to lose in these scenarios. Remember the goal of any of these automated software is to mimic and ordinary Instagram user. So before you configure anything bear that in mind, a normal Instagram user would not for example follow two hundred people a day in an attempt to expand your account reach.
There are many people and businesses online who are finding themselves increasingly constrained by having only a single network address. It’s not the technical limit that’s the issue, it’s the fact that increasingly IP addresses are used to filter, block or reroute online users. For example if you’re a business who advertises online in different countries, it’s only natural that you’d want to check your campaigns occasionally. Yet the problem is that what you see on your screen is not always going to be the same as your target audience.
Let’s for example look at one of the most popular sites on the internet – the BBC. This is what you see if you visit from outside the UK.
It looks similar to the main BBC site, but in fact it’s very different in many ways. This is BBC.com the site you will be redirected to if your IP is detected as being outside the UK. It’s designed for an international audience so has more a focus on global rather than UK news. It’s also missing most of the best bits of the BBC site, live streaming the TV channels and access to the BBC iPlayer archive.
Unfortunately this is a common occurrence and what you can see or access varies greatly depending on your physical location. Obviously this is a real nuisance if you’re in the UK and you want to check how your US Google adverts are looking. However it get’s worse than that and there’s many more restrictions, some sites you can’t even access if you’re not in the right location.
Furthermore research is difficult as your results are all skewed to your exact physical location. If you do anything international online you have to be very aware of these geographical considerations. Even relatively small companies will operate internationally over the internet so this isn’t an issue that just affects the big companies either.
Not Just Geographical Filtering
If this wasn’t bad enough, the internet is beginning to be segmented in other ways too. Although you can in some senses see a logical justification for filtering based on location, after all the search engines have always done it to ensure you get results which are localised. However the other growth area is in filtering based on the classification of your IP address.
IP addresses can also be split into two other groups (actually it’s more than this but these are the important ones) – commercial and residential addresses. Broadly speaking the residential ones are supplied to individuals and smaller businesses through their Internet Service Provider (ISP). Whereas the commercial addresses are assigned to corporate networks and datacentres. However from a web sites perspective the distinction is even more important – basically ordinary web users and commercial connections. Plus to extend the comparison, one group is full of ‘ordinary users’ and the other is full of commercial connections, bots, automated software, people using proxies and similar.
Not surprisingly most web sites have much more time for the first category and many have started filtering on this basis. For example a couple of years ago, Netflix got totally fed up with people using VPNs to switch which version they got access to. What was happening was people were logging in through a US VPN in order to get the much bigger and better US version. However this broke the film and movie industries rather archaic licensing rules and so they instigated a blanket ban on access to all commercial addresses.
Basically you couldn’t access Netflix from anything other than a residential IP address. If you accessed via a VPN or from a corporate network or anything remotely originating from a datacentre you’d get blocked. It was a huge change that of course you probably only noticed if you tried to watch Netflix from work or used a VPN to get more movies!
Growth of the Residential IP Provider Services
It’s not stopped there though, many websites are doing the same. Even if they’re not actively blocking yet they’re monitoring access from these commercial addresses. You’ll have problems on many sites using commercial addresses, including social networks and many e-commerce sites especially if used aggressively.
Many businesses have been forced to use residential IP proxies in order to conduct their research or access blocked resources. Many entrepreneurs who buy and sell online have found they need to use residential addresses to buy items especially if they’re scarce. Also internet marketers who run multiple Instagram or Facebook accounts have found that you’re much likely to get blacklisted from commercial IP addresses.
The demand is growing for these residential IP addresses as more and more websites start to favor them. Many marketers have been forced to invest in proxies which are pre-loaded with these IP addresses in contrast with the normal commercial addresses which were used previously.
They can be expensive but are invaluable in many situations particularly when accessing popular sites. The prices have come down slightly as providers have come up with technical solutions like rotating addresses automatically, but they’re still much more than commercial addresses. The problem is that unless you’re an ISP it’s actually difficult to get hold of them. So if you’ve started looking you may be surprised at some of the prices if you want to buy residential ips. they also have a tendency to be given different names too like ATC proxies which can also add to the confusion.
There are actually a few tactics to gain access to these addresses, although none of them are that easy. Probably the most straight forward and extensive is the one operated by a company called Luminati. They have literally millions of IP addresses available because they have a very unique way to gathering them. If you need real volume it’s probably the nearest you’re get to a network of unlimited residential proxies. The company offer a VPN service which users can access for free in exchange for allowing some of their bandwidth to be used as ‘a residential desktop proxy’. This means that connections are actually routed through an ordinary residential home users connection so are virtually indistinguishable from any other home based user. What’s more because the endpoint of the connection is not limited to some datacentre, there’s much more geographical variation involved. This is important if you want an IP address registered to a very specific location for example for posting in Craigslist.
It’s probably the most anonymous and hardest to detect residential IP address, although it’s not one of the cheapest options.
It’s over nearly three decades since I completed my economics degree, but I often wonder how much more interesting the subject would be now. Sure we’ve had global crashes, recessions and all sorts of financial scandals, but to some extent we’ve always had events like these throughout the last century.
There’s little doubt that if you follow economics you’ll see how uncertain a science it really is. Pick up a copy of the economist from any given time and you’ll see articles about how well an economy is doing. I can remember reading about the powerhouses of Brazil and Turkey from only a few years ago. Incredible stories of economic success and huge growth rates have almost inevitably been replaced with currency crashes, inflation and corruption scandals.
These tales of economic boom and bust are almost inevitable most underdeveloped countries almost inevitably experience this sort of growth. It’s not really these situations that I find most interesting in the world of economics – it’s somethign much newer and unique.
It’s called the digital economy and in many aspects has the potential to change the economics of the world. There is little doubt that those countries in the forefront of the global digital economy have a distinct advantage and there’s huge potential to add significantly to their GDP. However one of the advantages that the developed world has is the ability to incorporate these ‘new economic sectors’ into the taxation system.
Take for example the millions of people who now make some or all of their living online. Through websites, blogs or even video channels many people are making very decent incomes. Unfortunately for governments this income can be difficult to monitor and track and hence more difficult to tax than traditional employment. many countries already struggle with gathering taxes from their citizens, even a relatively successful economy like Turkey has huge issues in collecting tax revenue. It is largely cited that collecting taxes (or not) played a large part in the demise of the Greek economy too.
Can these countries successfully collect revenues based on income from YouTube or Amazon or from online casino sites? It’s much more difficult to collect and the more citizens that move to these income models the more important that this will become. One of the problems is that the methods of making money in the digital economy are extensive and varied which obviously means that the source of the income changes too.
For example, in the US there’s a huge market for people buying and selling online via a myriad of different sites. These are often little more than buying and selling without the needs of stocks, manufacturing and business premises. yet the numbers involved may be actually much larger. In the ‘streetwear’ market there’s lots of individuals making huge amounts of money buying goods online. One such market is for branded sneakers, which are released in limited numbers by companies like Supreme, Nike and Adidas. Individuals attempt to buy these and then resell at huge multiples.
This is possible because of the scarcity of these releases yet people develop systems to purchase these in bulk. They use software programs called ‘bots’ and location hiding devices servers called proxies to make multiple purchases. You can read all about these sort of systems in this article which explains the whole system and what are proxies for bots, and how you make money from them. Remember there are literally millions of people doing similar things all across the globe and making huge incomes.
In the US, UK and other developed countries there has been some effort to incorporate these people into the taxation system but it’s not easy. It relies heavily on self assessment methods in most places and can be very difficult to trace income if it’s not declared. Much of this income doesn’t even have to end up in a traditional bank account either. I know many internet entrepreneurs who deal primarily in digital currencies like Bitcoin and transfer through various electronic payment processors on the periphery of the traditional banking systems.
It’s easy to find negatives in the ‘digital economy’ however it’s important to realize that for many people it’s become increasingly important. What’s more in the ‘less developed’ countries it offers a potential for individuals to escape poverty and set up online businesses which are much easier to set up than traditional bricks and mortar ones.
The world is changing in many ways due to the internet, it’s important that economics keeps pace. Both to maximize the opportunities and to adapt to them.
John Heather
Blogger and technology journalist who writes on a variety of subjects all over the web. He also covers the world where technology and entertainment overlap, read this article about the Netflix and copyright blocks.
All devices on your wireless home network must use the same settings as your Wireless Router. WEP encryption is recommended to increase the security of your wireless network.
SSID
The SSID is the unique name shared among all devices in a wireless network. The SSID must be identical for all devices in the wireless network. It is case-sensitive and must not exceed 32 alphanumeric characters, which may be any keyboard character. I recommend that you change the default SSID to a unique name of your choice.
SSID Broadcast
Disabling SSID broadcasting can be a useful security feature. However, when SSID broadcasting is disabled, Wireless site survey tools such as Windows XP’s Zero Configuration utility will not function. It is best to disable the SSID broadcast AFTER you have configured all of your wireless network clients.
Channel
This setting specifies the default 802.11b channel used by the Wireless LAN communication. Wireless clients will scan through all available channels searching
for an Access Point.
With the new increased speeds, it’s now possible to stream all sorts of content directly to wireless connected devices not just those hard wired. For example you can stream high definition media across a properly configured wireless network to a myriad of devices. Try signing up for the free trial of BBC iPlayer abroad and you can gain access to thousands of shows and programmes on the BBC network. The following video demonstrates how simple it is:
WEP
An acronym for Wired Equivalent Privacy, WEP is an
encryption scheme used to protect your wireless data communications. WEP uses a combination of 40-bit keys to provide access control to your network and encryption security for every data transmission. To decode a data transmission,
each wireless client on the network must use an identical
64 or 128-bit key.
Note: Disable WEP while you build your wireless home network
Quick Tip: Buy an access point with a firewall installed – and don’t turn it off.
Additional Network Security Rules to Remember
Look for the SSL-enabled (Secure Sockets Layer) The leading security protocol on the Internet. When an SSL session is started, the server sends its public key to the browser, which the browser uses to send a randomly generated secret key back to the server in order to have a secret key exchange for that session.
Whenever you exchange sensitive information. this is usually indicated by a pad lock or some other visual indicator at the bottom of your browser also look for the URL in the browse window that starts with https:// – If a web page offers a secure version of the service use it. Always use secure, since it uses SSL encryption
Don’t use insecure email protocols like POP (Post Office Protocol) A standard mail server commonly used on the Internet.
Or IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) A standard mail server expected to be widely used on the Internet unless you also use SSL encryption. Check you email software and consult you administrator for more information. Usually web based email has a secure connection, but just check to make sure it start https://
Use a VPN (Virtual Private Network) if your company provides one.
Quick Tip: One of the easiest things you can do to protect your wireless home network is to change the default configuration settings on your router
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