So for the last couple of years we've been accessing our Swisscom TV subscription from France using the Hola free VPN service on a variety of Android and ios machines, with the Swisscom TV2.0 app (aka Swisscom air).
Recently it's been giving us lots of playback problems and now has stopped working altogether - the app just won't load, so I suspect that they've put it some specific IP blocks at their end. This is different from the response when you try and watch from a foreign IP where it specifically tells you it's unavailable from abroad.
I've tried a few other 'free' VPN services, mostly without success, although I'm now on a 24hr trial of ZENvpn which seems to be working fine. Fingers crossed.
But what I found really interesting, and I don't know if this is a recent change or has always been the case, is that using the app to watch recorded or previously aired programs works fine without the VPN. Nearly all the channels we watch have the 30 hour replay enabled, so in reality this means we can watch anything from these channels as long as the live broadcast is finished.
Really odd, but quite useful to know, and for 99% of our requirements it will do just fine. I will, however, be using the VPN to watch this afternoon's GP in real-ish time.
We used to use satellite, with a quad-lnb setup, and a UK Sky+ subscription, but as the old sky+ boxes started to give up the ghost (I'd had new power supplies put in them since years back, but this time the disks were dying on us) I invested instead in a couple of cheap Android TV boxes, also allowing netflix, Showbox (and for a while BBC Iplayer) etc. to run. And we use the same functionality available from various other mobile devices as well.
Once we'd got used to the replay and postdate-record functionality that seem unique to the Swisscom app, it became apparent to us that realtime-only (or look at schedules to set recordings in advance) TV was sooo last century that I've given up on the satellite use completely.