*New update 11/1/09 – see the bottom of this post

To get the code required to play RTE streams, visit http://www.blackdog.ie/tv/

In the 21st century it’s pretty easy for an Irish person living outside of Ireland to keep up with news and events at home with the help of the internet. I can read the newspapers, listen to radio, watch the news and so on all with the ease of the internet. Though it has it’s critics, RTE does put a fairly decent amount of it’s TV content online.

However, quite a lot of this content is what they call ‘geoblocked’, in other words you have to be accessing it from an IP address inside the 32 counties to view. In a lot of cases this is understandable, especially with sporting events where RTE has only bought rights to broadcast the event inside Ireland. In some cases though RTE seems to put a block on it’s homegrown programming for reasons I find difficult to understand. However, there is a relatively easy way to get around this for people abroad who want to view this content, with the help of somebody at home.

I’m going to use the tv show ‘Baby On Board’ as an example. This programme is aimed at expectant parents in Ireland and is one of the shows that RTE put a geoblock on.

The first thing we need to do is find a link to the .smil file for the particular programme. To do this, first click on the link on the RTE website to view the programme in question. If you are outside Ireland, the embedded Real Player will show a message saying the programme is only available inside Ireland. Right-click on this window and select ‘open in Real Player’. This will start Real Player as a standalone program and show the same message.

In the standalone Real Player, select ‘file’, then ‘clip properties’ and ‘view clip info’ (or CTRL+I). This will display a .smil link. Copy this link.

Now you need to download this link and open it in notepad. Trouble is, if you’re outside Ireland, this is where the geoblock kicks in.  So if I download this link here in NZ and open in notepad I just get some html with ‘nz auckland’ in it, because it’s identified my location from my IP address. One way around this is to use and Irish proxy server, the trouble is a working Irish proxy is ridiculously hard to find, so there’s a much easier way….

Email the .smil link to a friend in Ireland and ask them to download to their desktop and open in notepad. Because they’re in Ireland, they will get the un-geoblocked version. When they open it in notepad, inside will be a direct .rm link to the stream required. For this particular programme the link is

rtsp://streaming3.rte.ie/geoblock/937781e0c4b2d229ee3c7dd9f8be374f/geoblock/2008/babyonboard-186581-243.rm

Once your friend emails you back with this link copy it, open in your Real Player, and voila! Geoblock removed…

I’m posting this here so that it might help anybody else in my situation. Please note that I don’t condone breaking the law and sometimes there’s a good legal reason you’re not supposed to watch!

Update 9/10/08

Paul from blackdog.ie has written some very useful code which will take away the effort of having somebody in Ireland decipher the smil file for you

Just go to http://www.blackdog.ie/tv/ and stick your smil file link in there and you should get the direct stream link back. Let us know in the comments if it works for you.

Update 17/10/08

Well it seems that this fix no longer works. It’s quite possible that the webmasters have found a way to block it. However I would advise people to keep trying it and post a comment on if or how you got it to work. I heard a rumour that RTE are to switch to a new streaming structure soon anyway, which would make all of this obsolete.

Update 11/1/09

The blackdog link is now fully operational again. Visit the link above to get your required stream, and thanks again to Paul.