About Unblock Couch

There is a handful of sticky notes on a wall in a top-floor flat in Lisbon's Graça neighbourhood. Each one has a VPN server name and a date, with a tick or a cross next to it depending on whether iPlayer loaded that week. That wall is roughly the filing system behind this site.

Unblock Couch exists for people who already have a VPN and are watching it fail. The guides here are not about whether you should subscribe to something. They are for the moment you are in a hotel room, your iPlayer has stopped working, you have already tried the obvious things, and you need to know what comes next. Tested in actual places, at actual times, on actual subscriptions.

Every guide records a real setup in a real city during a real stay. When something works, the guide says so. When something fails halfway through, that goes in too. VPN server pools and streaming detection methods change constantly, so anything more than a few months old should be treated as a starting point rather than a guarantee.

Run by Tessa Pemberton, who has been living with these tools across three continents for four years.

Some links here are affiliate links. If you sign up for a service through one of them, I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. I only recommend services I have paid for and used myself while traveling.