When visiting some Australian TV channel websites to catch-up on some TV viewing by watching the streaming version of shows, the following message appears: “You are unauthorised to watch this video as you are in the wrong location”. I am unsure what this means or how it can be fixed. The computer is running Windows XP.

When TV stations put streaming versions of shows on their website they need to make sure that only people within the relevant country are able to watch the show, since generally the TV shows are aired at different times overseas. This is usually done based upon the user’s IP address – their unique identifier (or address) when using a network such as the internet. It is possible to lookup the IP address of the user to see who owns that address, which would generally be your internet service provider. A determination can then be made about where that internet service provider is located (i.e. the country and city). Since it is a fair assumption that the user of that internet service provider would also be located in the same city (or at least country) as the provider, a determination can be made as to whether they are in a region which can view that streaming content. If they are not within an approved region then the unauthorised message which you are receiving would be displayed instead.

Obviously there is something wrong in your situation, since you are most likely using an Australian ISP and attempting to view streaming TV from an Australian TV channel’s website. So, it is likely that the website system is making an incorrect determination based upon your IP address. This is generally a server-side issue, so there probably isn’t much we can do to fix the problem. However, it would be worthwhile ensuring that you are running the latest version of the Adobe Flash Player (get.adobe.com/flashplayer) since the vast majority of online streaming players use Flash, so we just want to ensure there isn’t any compatibility problems with potentially an older version running on your computer.

However, if you find that the problem continues after upgrading to the latest version of Flash then I suggest you contact the website support for the TV channel which is not working correctly so that they can investigate the issue, since it might be something that needs to be fixed on their end.