There is very little a Beovision does not do well. It is beautiful, the sound is extraordinary, and it will do almost anything you ask of it.

Abroad, there is one thing it will not do at all: play BBC iPlayer.

So you go looking for a VPN app for it, and there is not one. Not a bad one. None.

There is a very good reason for that, and once you know it the whole problem becomes simple.

Your Beovision Is an LG Inside

Since 2016, Bang & Olufsen has built its televisions around LG OLED panels — which is a sensible piece of engineering, because LG makes the finest OLED panels in the world and there is no reason to reinvent one.

Every Beovision in the current range — Harmony, Theatre, Eclipse, Contour and the Beosound Premiere — is built on an LG OLED panel running LG's webOS. It is a partnership that goes back a decade, and it is not a secret; it is simply not something anyone mentions in the showroom.

What B&O adds is everything around the panel, and it is not a small thing: the acoustics, the cabinetry, the aluminium, the motorised stand, the engineering that makes a television behave like a piece of furniture. That part is genuinely theirs and nobody else does it.

But the software running on the panel is LG's webOS. And that is the part that matters here.

And That Is Exactly Why There Is No VPN App

webOS is a closed platform. There is no VPN client in its app store and no way to sideload one, and that is a decision LG made, not a gap somebody forgot to fill.

The VPN companies say so themselves. Ask Surfshark or NordVPN how to use their service on a webOS television and they will tell you the same thing: you cannot install it on the set — you put the VPN on the router instead.

This is not a shortcoming of your television, and it is not something B&O got wrong. It is a property of the platform — it is true of every set running webOS, and no specification and no options list will change it, because there is simply nothing there to install.

Which is oddly good news. It means you can stop hunting for an app that was never going to exist, and fix the thing that is actually in the way.

One Exception — and It Does Not Help

To be accurate about it: there was one Bang & Olufsen television that ran Android TV, and could therefore install a VPN app — the BeoVision 14, discontinued in 2018.

If that happens to be the one in your house, do not get your hopes up. Being able to install a VPN app is not the same as being able to watch anything.

The big names — ExpressVPN, NordVPN, Surfshark — route you through commercial data-centre IP addresses, and BBC iPlayer and ITVX have known those addresses for years. The app installs. It connects. It tells you cheerfully that you are in London. And the moment you press play, iPlayer blocks it anyway.

Which is really the point of this whole page. The television was never the wall. The address is — and that is just as true of the one B&O that can run an app as it is of the four that cannot.

The Fix Is the Address, Not the App

Here is the thing that actually changed when you moved abroad. It was not your subscription and it was not your television. It was the address your connection arrives from.

A pre-configured SmartHub VPN router gives you a UK residential IP address — an ordinary British home-broadband address, the kind millions of households connect from every night. To iPlayer, ITVX, Sky and the rest, your Beovision simply looks like a television in a house in the UK.

Because it works at the router, there is nothing to install on the television at all — which is the only approach that can work here, and happens also to be the one that suits the set. No app, no login screen, no annual argument with a subscription you did not want. It just plays.

And it covers everything else in the house while it is at it, which for a household with this much kit in it is not a small thing.

Which SmartHub for a Custom Install

A Beovision usually arrives with an installer, structured wiring and a network somebody else configured — often a mesh you would rather not disturb.

For that house, the SmartHub Core is the right piece. It is an Ethernet-only gateway with no Wi-Fi radio of its own, so it adds no second network and competes with nothing. It sits inline behind what you already have, and the television — or the Apple TV feeding it — simply arrives from Britain.

If your Beovision is part of a wider automation system, that brings its own question, and we have written it up separately: Control4 and Araknis routers cannot run a VPN client either, and the fix is much the same.

Let the Beovision Be a Screen

There is a second way to look at this, and for a television of that quality it is arguably the better one.

A Beovision is an extraordinary panel and an even more extraordinary set of speakers. It does not also need to be a computer. Feed it from a Freely TV box over HDMI and you get live British television and catch-up over the internet — no dish, no aerial — and what webOS can or cannot install stops being your problem entirely.

Both boxes we supply handle the free-to-view channels. The Manhattan Aero takes a wired Ethernet connection, which suits a house with structured wiring already in the walls. The Netgem PLEIO runs the NOW app — the only one of the two that does — so it is the box if you want Sky Sports on that screen.

Either way, the television goes back to doing what it is superb at, and nothing is installed on it.

Final Thoughts

The reason there is no VPN app for a Bang & Olufsen is not an oversight, and it is certainly not a failing of the television. It is that the platform underneath is webOS, and webOS does not do VPN apps. Not on a Beovision, and not on anything else.

So the fix is not on the television at all, which is just as well — it is the last place you would want to be installing things. A pre-configured VPN router with a genuine UK residential IP puts a British address on the connection, and your own subscriptions behave the way they did at home. The Beovision carries on doing what it is extraordinarily good at.

At Stream UK TV Abroad we supply the routers ready to plug in, and we are happy to talk it through with your installer.

For international orders we generally use UPS Express, keeping delivery and customs clearance as fast and hassle-free as possible; UK orders ship with DPD, usually next-day after dispatch.

Watch UK TV Abroad on Your Beovision