England's home cricket summer is one of the longest-running fixtures in the sporting calendar — Test series, white-ball internationals and the domestic game stretching right across the warmer months. The 2026 season is a big one, with England Men hosting New Zealand and Pakistan in the Test arena and facing India and Sri Lanka in white-ball cricket, alongside a full women's programme and The Hundred.
If you're abroad for any of it — on holiday, working away or living overseas — the cricket doesn't have to stop. Here's how to follow England's summer from anywhere in the world.
For UK viewers, the cricket is split across two broadcasters:
So most of the cricket — the Test series, the white-ball games, the bulk of the season — lives on Sky Sports and NOW, with the BBC carrying a free selection alongside it.
The catch is that Sky Sports, NOW and BBC iPlayer are all geo-restricted to the UK. The moment you're abroad, they detect your location and the coverage stops — whether you're a paying Sky or NOW subscriber or just trying to catch a free BBC game on iPlayer.
The usual workaround is a VPN, but the big-name VPN apps are routinely blocked by UK streaming services, because they run on shared data-centre IP addresses that broadcasters recognise and shut out. You can read more in our guide on why ExpressVPN, NordVPN and Surfshark stop working on UK streaming.
The setup that holds up is a VPN router with a UK residential IP address — an ordinary home-broadband address, the same kind millions of UK households use. To Sky, NOW and the BBC, your connection simply looks like a viewer at home in the UK, so you're far less likely to be blocked.
Because it works at router level, every device connected to it is covered — smart TV, Apple TV, Firestick or streaming box. You watch the cricket through the same apps you'd use at home, on the big screen, in full quality.
A full day's Test cricket is long, so a proper TV setup beats squinting at a laptop — and it means the whole household can follow the session, not just whoever's holding the phone. This works for following England's summer from across Europe, the USA, Canada, Australia, the Gulf and beyond.
At Stream UK TV Abroad, we supply pre-configured VPN routers that work straight out of the box, shipped worldwide. Plug the router into your internet abroad, connect your TV or streaming device, and open Sky Sports, NOW or BBC iPlayer as you would at home.
It's the same setup our customers use for the rest of their UK viewing, so a single router covers the cricket alongside everything else. If you already watch Sky abroad, our guide on how to watch Sky Stream abroad covers that side of the setup in more detail.
England's summer runs for months, and the best sessions have a habit of arriving when you least expect them. Rather than scrambling to fix a stream on the morning of a Test, get your setup sorted in advance — order the router, plug it in, and confirm Sky, NOW and iPlayer all play cleanly while there's no match on the line.
Following the rest of the summer of sport too? See our guides to watching the British Grand Prix abroad and the Commonwealth Games abroad.
England's home cricket summer is built for following day by day — and being abroad doesn't have to mean missing it. With the season split across Sky Sports and NOW for the bulk of the cricket and the BBC for a free selection, all of it is UK-only once you leave the country.
A VPN router with a UK residential IP is the most reliable way to reach all three from anywhere in the world, especially paired with a proper TV-based setup. Get it in place ahead of time and you spend the summer watching the cricket, not troubleshooting it.
At Stream UK TV Abroad, we supply pre-configured routers designed to make exactly that simple.
