How to watch Australian TV overseas with your Mac

Step 1: sign up at the Witopia website

Go to the Witopia website and choose a plan. Note, Australian Business Traveller is not affiliated or partnered with Witopia — we're just recommending a service we know to be reliable and easy to set up.
If you are not travelling to Belize, Canada, China, Morocco, Guyana, Italy, Oman or the United Arab Emirates (UAE) you can get away with buying the PersonalVPN PPTP service.
However, if you are visiting Belize, Canada, China, Morocco, Guyana, Italy, Oman or the United Arab Emirates (UAE), you need to get a more secure service which is less easily blocked by the governments and ISPs of those countries — the personalVPN SSL service.
Note: if you want to be able to watch Australian TV on your iPad or iPhone/iPod Touch, you'll have to subscribe to either the plain PPTP service, or the SSL/PPTP combination service  a year. This is because the Apple's iOS supports PPTP VPNs automatically, but not SSL VPNs.
Choose the service appropriate to you and proceed with the sign-up. For this tutorial, we selected the  personalVPN SSL service, as it's the most secure and hardest to block type for use on a PC or Mac. Our instructions below are specific to the SSL account type and will not work for the PPTP one.

Step 2: Download the Witopia software

You should receive an email in your inbox that looks like this. Click the link we've highlighted in red to go to the Witopia page that activates your service and lets you download the software installer.

This page of instructions should appear. If you like, you can follow Witopia's instructions from here on, but we've continued the tutorial below for the sake of completeness.

Click the activation link, and you'll be taken to the below page, where you'll be asked to put in the order number and your email address. It's important to put "ORD" in all caps before the number, and your email address in lower case.
If you copy and paste the details from the email Witopia sent you, also make sure there are no spaces before or after the information, as that may cause the login to fail.
For example:
ORD123456789
dan@ausbt.com.au

The following screen allows you to activate the service.

On the next screen, click continue to start the process of making the Witopia software. This software has your account details baked into it, so don't share it with anyone else. The benefit of this all-in-one approach is you don't have to do any tricky configuration yourself (which is common with most other VPN providers.)

Once that's done, a link will appear on screen that allows you to download the installer.

Step 3 - install the Witopia software

When the file has finished downloading in your browser, locate the PersonalVPN.dmg file in your downloads folder, and open it. Drag the Viscosity.app file over to the app folder shortcut on the right hand side of the window to install it on your Mac.

Step 4 - run the Witopia software and connect to the VPN

Viscosity is the program that connects you to the Witopia VPN. Open your app folder and run Viscosity. It will ask if you want to automatically check for updates (untick the box, as the version you have downloaded from Witopia is the newest one they've tested and approved.)

The Viscosity icon appears in your menu bar as a small globe icon.
To watch Australian TV while you are overseas, you need to connect to an Australian VPN server. Click the globe and select the "connect - au sydney" menu option.

Once you've selected the Australian server, you should notice that the small padlock icon next to it goes orange, then green to indicate that it is connected.
You should now be able to access any of the Australian TV websites to watch full episodes online, and live ABC News 24 streaming video — from anywhere in the world.

Where to find Australian TV shows to watch online

See our full A-Z list of full episodes of Australian TV shows to watch online and which websites to watch them on.
Once you're finished watching TV, you can disconnect the VPN — simply click on the globe icon in the menu bar again, and click the "disconnect au - sydney" item.

There's no need to quit Viscosity — it doesn't do anything while you are disconnected from the VPN, but it's handy to have it available in case you do need to connect while travelling.