Our best drag sissies – from Thailand to Holland – go head-to-head to prove they have the Charisma, Uniqueness, Nerve and Talent to be crowned the World’s Best Drag Superstar in the first EVER global version of Drag Race. Read on for how to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World online from anywhere in the world – and totally FREE on BBC iPlayer in the UK.
This international iteration of the Drag Race franchise sees queens from Holland, Canada, Thailand, the UK and more battle it out for the heavyweight world title. Among those flying the flag for the USA are fan-favorite Jujubee, returning to Drag Race an incredible fourth time, and Mo Heart: the artist formerly known as Monique.
Baga Chipz, meanwhile, will be hoping to do “much betta!” than her fellow UK queen Blu Hydrangea, and Janey Jacké is coming to slay for her native Holland.
Main judges Ru, Michelle Visage, Graham Norton and Alan Carr will expect only the most gag-worthy lewks, lip syncs, and polished runway presentations (they certainly won’t want “any f***ing H&M"). Luckily, they’ll have help in finding the first “Queen of the Mothertucking World” from some excellent UK celebrity guests, including pop star royalty Mel C and ex-glamour model Katie Price.
Ready to see which of our superstars will slay and which will sashay away? Below we’ll break down how to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World online now (and 100% FREE with BBC iPlayer ).
How to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World online for FREE in the UK
How to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World online from outside your country
If you’re out of the country at any point during the new series of RuPaul's Drag Race UK vs The World, you’ll find regional restrictions prevent you from streaming the show as you normally would.
Luckily, circumventing geo-blocks is actually really simple. All you need to do is download a VPN to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World online no matter where you are. It's an ingenious piece of software that changes your IP address, so you can access on-demand content or live TV just as if you were at home.
How to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World online in the US
How to watch RuPaul's Drag Race UK vs The World online in Canada
How to watch RuPaul’s Drag Race UK vs The World online in Australia
Who are the contestants of RuPaul's Drag Race UK vs The World?
American queen Jujubee is making another appearance in the franchise after featuring in the original show’s second season, All Stars 1 and All Stars 5, which makes her the only contestant to feature in the franchise a record-breaking four times.
US contestant Mo Heart (formerly Monique Heart) is back too . The reason for the change of name is that, not only do they want to give more “heart” in everything that they do, but it expresses their increasing identification as a non-binary artist.
Racing for Canada is “Drag Clown” Jimbo from Canada’s Drag Race season 1, who got very salty at judge Jeffrey Bowyer-Chapman's critiques, but won the coveted Snatch Game challenge. They'll feature alongside 25-year-old Toronto native Lemon , who describes herself as “sour as hell.”
UK queen Cheryl Hole returns to redeem herself after not winning a single Maxi Challenge in season 1 of Drag Race UK, although she was a noted lip sync assassin. She knocked Blu Hydrangea - the show’s only Northern Irish contestant - out of the competition. Blu is back too though, and ready, she says, to “send some bitches home.”
Meanwhile, London-based Baga Chipz will also re-enter the werkroom, delighting fans with her endless mugging and iconic catchphrases like “much betta!” and “very ‘arsh, very 'arsh!”
The final two contestants are Janey Jacké and Thailand’s Pangina Heals . Janey came second only to winner Envy Peru in Drag Race Holland’s inaugural season – and promises to bring “a lot of fire” this time – while Pangina is the famous host of Drag Race Thailand. However, she describes herself as being “the dark horse of the competition.”
Who are the celebrity guest judges on RuPaul's Drag Race UK vs The World?
Use WOW Presents Plus to watch RuPaul's Drag Race and more
WOW Present Plus is the self-dubbed "official streamer of all things drag" and comes to us from World of Wonder, the production company behind RuPaul's Drag Race.
As such, it has an impressive catalogue of RuPaul shows - including the latest season 14 episodes - available to stream all over the world including in markets like India, South Africa, the UAE and many other countries. A full list of what's available and where can be found here .
It's a pretty niche offering but if drag shows are your thing, you'll find it also hosts the likes of UNHhhh, Untucked, and Transformations - all for the ultra-affordable price of just $3.99 a month. Best of all, there's a FREE 7-day trial on offer so you can sashay on over and check it out for yourself.
NVIDIA GeForce NOW will make you rethink what cloud gaming really is
You’ve probably heard a lot about cloud gaming. The game library isn’t big. You’ve got to re-buy games you already own. It’s inferior to PC gaming. The lag makes most games unplayable. Depending on the cloud gaming platform, some of these things may be true. But NVIDIA is setting the record straight with GeForce NOW. The technology has come a long way, and the performance and features on offer can provide parity with PC gaming in ways you likely didn’t realize.
The graphics aren’t that good?
If you’ve tried to stream content over a poor internet connection, you might run into bad visuals. But with a strong internet connection, you’ll realize just how much power is under the hood in GeForce NOW to provide exceptional visuals. NVIDIA offers an RTX 3080 membership for GeForce NOW that provides an experience the vast majority of gamers aren’t getting out of their gaming PCs or consoles. There’s enough muscle there to deliver 1440p at 120fps or 4K HDR. Nvidia’s RTX real-time ray tracing is also available to provide life-like reflections and lighting, a rendering technique that takes serious power and will make a lot of computers sweat.
And all of that power is running behind the scenes, in the cloud, so you can enjoy it on your phone, MacBook, streaming device, or even a modest Chromebook. Just about whatever you can connect to the internet with and connect a controller or keyboard and mouse too. Running that heavy processing in the cloud also means the electric bill and heat in your room aren’t going up like they would from a local PC.
The lag makes games unplayable?
If your internet is having a lag spike, your online games are going to be unplayable whether you’re using the cloud or a local system. But with fast internet, you’ll find GeForce NOW more than up to the task of offering a responsive gaming experience. NVIDIA’s servers offer stable performance that can help provide consistent frame rendering times, helping minimize that component of lag. With the RTX 3080 Membership, you’ll get a boost from even faster frame rendering and more efficient encoding. On a modest internet connection, your inputs will likely feel as responsive as gaming on a console. NVIDIA also has plenty of tips on optimizing your latency . As NVIDIA has expanded its service, you’ll have an easier time finding servers that may be closer to you (and therefore reduce ping).
There aren’t enough games?
If you’re looking at the wrong gaming service, it might feel like there aren’t enough games to play. If you look at the huge list of titles supported on GeForce NOW , you might change your mind. GeForce NOW has a library of more than 1,000 games, including AAA titles from the most popular publishers like EA Ubisoft, Epic, and more as well as critically acclaimed indie hits. Its library includes graphically stunning games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Far Cry 6 with RTX On and DLSS for superb visuals and exceptional performance. The service also offers almost 100 free-to-play titles, including industry titans like Fortnite, Apex Legends, and Destiny 2.
You’ve got to pay for games you already bought?
Depending on the cloud gaming service, you might have to buy a game again even though you already have it in your PC gaming library. Fortunately, NVIDIA GeForce NOW isn’t one of those services. This subscription is for the PC gaming rig in the cloud, not for the games. In fact, you can log into Steam, Uplay, Epic Games Store, and GOGom to access your libraries and play supported games through GeForce NOW. Not only do you not need to re-purchase them, you also don’t need to wait to download them or update them. That’s especially handy if you like to game on a lot of different devices. You won’t be downloading the game a half dozen times, and you won’t even have to find storage space for your games. The amount you’d need to spend on storage to keep a thousand games available on all your devices at a moment's notice makes the $10-$20 subscription cost of GeForce NOW look like even more of a bargain than it already is.
You can’t play with your friends?
You have to be on a console to game with your console friends, and you have to be on a PC to game with your PC friends, right? That’s just it — when you use GeForce NOW, you are using a gaming PC. That gaming PC is in the cloud, but it’s still a gaming PC. You can link up with your friends just the same as if you were on your own local PC. For games that support cross-play, you won’t miss out on that functionality either.
If you’re still skeptical about cloud gaming, why not let NVIDIA GeForce NOW prove it’s the real deal. You can sign up for a subscription here to reap all the benefits of the service, from 4K HDR or 1440p/120fps to near-instant game downloads and PC gaming across a huge range of devices. You can even try the service for free to get a taste. And if you think it’s good now, you should know it just keeps getting better. To stay up to speed on all the new games and developments on the service, you can tune in weekly for the GFN Thursdays blog or follow GeForce NOW on Facebook and Twitter .
Could the first Sonos headphones come with Wi-Fi?
For twenty years now, Sonos has been in the business of making exceptional wireless audio systems and speakers . In the 17 years since its first wireless speaker shipped it has embraced soundbars and network streamers, network extenders and portable speakers , multi-room audio and even in-car audio for the likes of Audi. But there’s one big gap in the product range. Sonos doesn’t make headphones .
That’s an interesting omission, because the people who buy Sonos gear tend to be people who really love music. And while there’s no substitute for the thrill of listening to great music on equally great speakers, there are times when that’s not an option: when the kids are in bed, in the wee small hours when you live in an apartment block, or when you’re away from home. So if you really love music, chances are you’re happy to buy a good pair of headphones too so that you can listen to your favourite music or enjoy movie soundtracks at those times too.
The prospect of dedicated Sonos wireless headphones is a very compelling concept and we’re sure any pair would be high on many Sonos users’ wish lists. But so far the headphones and earbuds remain a rumour: we thought we’d see Sonos wireless headphones or earbuds launch in 2021, but that came and went – and 2022 is pretty quiet on that front too. And that’s a shame, because it seems that Sonos’s headphones may raise the bar for wireless listening by using Wi-Fi to deliver audio quality that Bluetooth simply can’t match.
Reports that Sonos has been creating its own wireless headphones have been circulating since 2019, when Bloomberg first reported the project based on a newly discovered patent.
Since then two further patents have provided more detail: one, discovered in Germany, describes over-ear headphones that resemble Apple’s AirPods Max or Sony’s WH-1000XM4 ; the other, filed in the US, shows an innovative approach to wireless earbuds with one design showing almost triangular earbuds slotting into opposite sides of their charging case. Both the headphones and the earbuds’ charging case appear to have USB-C inputs and the over-ears also appear to have a 3.5mm headphone jack. But what about the wireless technology they use to connect?
Like Apple, Sonos is expected to deliver automatic handoff between its headphones and its other products, which in Sonos’ case means its multi-room audio devices. The Sonos Roam already does this via its Sound Swap feature; while the Roam is a Bluetooth speaker , the feature only works on Wi-Fi.
So it’s not unreasonable to think that if Sonos’ headphones were to support Sound Swap, they too would need a Wi-Fi connection. You can see the appeal: your Sonos cans would be part of your entire Sonos system , so you could start listening on one device and then handoff to your headphones for even closer listening.
The German patent for Sonos’s over-ear headphones appears to confirm the presence of Wi-Fi in its over-ears, describing not one but two integrated Wi-Fi antennae, one in each ear cup. This would require a thicker than normal connecting cable that “may be greater than 4mm in diameter… almost twice the diameter of a typical headband cable in a Bluetooth-only headphone.” The reason for two antennae rather than one? Your head is a pretty effective Wi-Fi signal blocker.
But Sound Swap isn’t the only reason Sonos may be making Wi-Fi wireless headphones. The big draw here is bandwidth.
Why Wi-Fi could mean better audio
Although Bluetooth with the aptX Adaptive HD codec is capable of streaming 24-bit music at up to 576kbps and Sony’s LDAC codec can go up to 990kbps, some manufacturers – notably Apple – have expressed their frustrations at the limitations of Bluetooth for high quality audio. Speaking to What Hi-Fi , Apple VP of acoustics Gary Geaves discussed Apple’s work with Bluetooth ,saying “it’s fair to say that we would like more bandwidth and… I’ll stop right there. We would like more bandwidth.”
While 576 to 990kbps is very, very good and almost double or triple the bitrate of the highest quality MP3, it still isn’t lossless: uncompressed CD audio is 1,411kbps and hi-res audio is 9,216kbps. There is an aptX standard for lossless audio, aptX Lossless, but it’s still subject to Bluetooth’s bandwidth limitations. Wi-Fi isn’t, and it has a longer range too.
There are two big downsides to Wi-Fi, however. The first is power consumption. While the most recent Wi-Fi standards are more efficient than their predecessors, Bluetooth is typically 30% more energy efficient than Wi-Fi – important if you’re out and about and want long battery life. And the second is that Wi-Fi needs a network to connect to. That’s fine at home, but when you’re out it means Wi-Fi is a double battery drain because your phone needs to run as a hotspot.
The solution? Wi-Fi for your home and Bluetooth for your phone, which appears to be exactly what Sonos is planning. The only reference to Wi-Fi in its patents is in the one for the over-ear headphones , so presumably they’re intended for listening to at home while the earbuds are for when you roam.
When will Sonos wireless headphones launch?
Don’t hold your breath. Last month , Sonos CEO Patrick Spence said that the firm would not be launching any new product ranges any time soon; “in fiscal 2022, we are focused on launching new products in our existing product categories.” Fiscal 2022 refers to Sonos’ financial year, which ends on September 30.
Some industry watchers, such as Channel News AU , suspect that the headphones story was leaked deliberately to reassure investors: Sonos’ share price has been on a downward trend in recent months. The more likely explanation is that the supply chain issues that continue to plague the consumer electronics industry have made Sonos revise its product plans.
For now, though, that means we’re in ‘reading tea leaves’ territory: anything anyone at Sonos does is pounced upon in the hope that it’s a clue. Most recently Sonos VP of global marketing and communications, Pete Pedersen, posted on LinkedIn that Sonos was “looking to partner with a thoughtful, creative, and innovative integrated marketing firm for one of the most ambitious projects in our history… targeting a new audience/consumer segment.”
Headphones? Maybe. But then again, maybe it’s the Home Theater OS project we think Sonos is also working on, which aims to “deliver a next generation content delivery experience” across mobile, TV, tablet and other hardware.