Receiving UK TV

There's been quite a bit of discussion about this since the satellites changed in January. As I see it you have at least 7 choices.

1. Read a good book instead. A really good option as there is precious little on the tube worth watching anyway!
2. Get a huge dish - if you had a working Freeview system, but lost it with the satellite changes in February, you can get it back. Apparently all you need is a 2 metre or larger dish! The mairie and your neighbours might not be so pleased.
3. Get a UK Sky HD box. Various companies such as Céret-based www.skydigi.tv will be able to supply the kit and help you get this going. You need to get a Sky HD box as it uses a different satellite to the standard Sky but it still comes in fine for now. You don't need to subscribe to the HD version of Sky. This option requires a monthly sub to normal Sky, and a heavy setup cost. If you have one, your old dish will be fine. If you want UK Sky Sport or Movies, this is the only option I can think of.
4. Get an IPTV set-top box (normally Android-based). There are a number of outfits (skydigi.tv included) who will supply a set-top box at €100+, which will send through all the UK Freeview channels in HD. You pay something like a €20 monthly fee to subscribe - some providers will let you turn this service on and off (possibly at a slightly higher monthly rate), others you have to subscribe all year. Some of the providers are better than others apparently and you might get stuck if the one you have chosen folds, or the rules change or their service becomes oversubscribed and the quality drops. The box will be sent to you and it sounds relatively easy to set up. It needs a connection to unlimited internet, but most French internet is unlimited already.
5. Get your own Android set-top IPTV box. You can pick these up from sites like www.aliexpress.com or www.dx.com (great sites for getting gadgets at super-low prices, sent post-free worldwide - I've bought gadgets, LED bulbs etc). These boxes work the same as Option 4 above but the original cost is half. You have a wider choice of what you receive on it, but there will be precious little support apart from using Mr Google. It turns your TV into a huge Android tablet screen so you can run any Android applications on it. I'll probably try this option sometime. You can use it to run FilmOn as below.
6. Use FilmOn. This is an app that is available on Android, iOS or Windows. It will pick up dozens of UK Free-To-Air (FTA) channels, and hundreds of rubbish channels. You can watch it on your phone, tablet or computer, or possibly directly on some of the newer Smart TVs. Standard definition is free, but you may have to wait for some quick ads before you start seeing your chosen programme.
   
   For €9.95/month you can subscribe to their ad-free HD version, which also gives you 20 hours of recording space which you can use to record channels to watch later. You can pay a little more to get more recording space. There's a button labelled HD that lets you try the HD version for a few minutes so you can see if you think it is worth the money. There is a possibility FilmOn might get banned at some point, but it has been around a while now. It's not like you are investing much in it!
   
   If your TV can't run FilmOn (most can't) then you might want to look at ways to get the phone/tablet/PC signal onto the TV. Four choices I can think of here...
1. DLNA direct - if both your phone/tablet and your TV support DLNA (or Airplay or Allshare or MiraCast) then you can probably send it direct to the TV, full-screen, with no more gadgets required. Newer tablets and phones both Android and Apple, and Windows 8.1 computers, can probably do the sending, many smart or recent TVs can receive it. Open FilmOn on your phone/tablet and there is a little button top right of the live window which looks like a little rectangle within a larger rectangle. Click on this and if your TV supports DLNA, you should see it listed. If so, touch the name of the TV and all should work. Best thing is that you can keep using your phone to do other things, such as check programme guides, and the TV will still be playing in the background.
2. DLNA via an EZCast gadget - this is a way to make an ordinary TV into a DLNA-capable TV. It's a gadget that plugs into an HDMI port on your TV, and mine cost under €20 delivered ex amazon.fr. Once plugged in, it works as above. The EZCast gizmo will also let you show photos, videos and more on the TV. This means you can watch all kinds of other stuff such a rerun TV shows if you can find them on the internet. The gadget is supposed to do screen mirroring, but I struggled to get mine working well from my older Android phone and tablet , both 2+ years old. It's OK from the computer.
3. DLNA to your FreeBox/OrangeBox/Bluray player or whatever else you may have connected to the TV, provided of course these run DLNA. My Freebox accepts it, but then locks up in a few minutes.
4. Cable - your tablet (probably not your phone) may have a mini-HDMI port and with a suitable cable you can connect to a spare HDMI port on your TV and Bob's your uncle, your TV will mirror your tablet screen. Not a great solution as you have a cable to trip over (I tried this, and did this), and you can't do anything else on your phone or it will appear on the TV hiding the FilmOn programme. You can also connect a PC to your TV, but it's a bit clumsy.
7. Just watch UK TV replays. This includes BBC iPlayer, Channel 4's 4oD, or ITV's ITVPlayer. These services let you watch programs which have recently played - they are sometimes called "catch-up" services. You can view these on your computer, phone or tablet. The main problem is that they are blocked to non-UK internet addresses, so a French-based person will have trouble using them. Also you may want to send the pictures through to your TV - see the whole section above.
   
   To get round the location restrictions, you need something called VPN, which fools the BBC and others into thinking you are based in the UK/US or wherever. There are some free ones (programs or applications you load on your machine) but in my experience they are pretty bad - they break down, and all your internet is slowed down. I use something called SmartDNS from www.overplay.net, which only costs $4.95/month. It lets your computer/gadget pretend to be from wherever the website expects you to be from, and seems to be very fast.

Hope this all makes some sense! For now I am using FilmOn HD version on my phone or tablet, with the EZCast gadget beaming it onto the TV. For things such as seeing the ball in tennis I found I needed HD, as SD is a bit blurry depending on the channel I'm watching.