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BBC Begins Blocking VPN Access To iPlayer (torrentfreak.com)
nickweller points out Ars Technica's report (based on news initially on Torrent Freak) that The BBC has begun to block VPN users from its iPlayer video streaming service. From the article: Naturally, VPN providers are already working on a fix for the block, with IPVanish already claiming it has found a way around it.
Earlier this year, a GlobalWebIndex report claimed that up to 60 million people outside the UK had been accessing iPlayer. The BBC disputes this figure however, saying: "These figures simply aren’t plausible. All our evidence shows the vast majority of BBC iPlayer usage is in the UK. BBC iPlayer and the content on it is paid for by UK licence fee payers in the UK and we take appropriate steps to protect access to this content."
"BBC iPlayer and the content on it is paid for by UK licence fee payers in the UK and we take appropriate steps to protect access to this content."
That's all well and good, but what about UK licence fee payers who are temporarily outside the UK? Shouldn't they still be able to access the content they are, after all, still paying for? Perhaps a more thoughtful process based on a log in, rather than just a blanket geo-block, might be a better solution.
One would think they would like to spread their culture and/or propaganda to as wide an audience as possible. I don't understand the desire to lock down their content.
On the Oregon Cost born and raised, On the beach is where I spent most of my days
EU, a continent with borders, at least for human smugglers, drugs traffickers, money launderers and undeclared workers, but playing a documentary or tv show from your neighboring country? Than you're an ordinary thief, a pirate, a criminal.
It's easier to kidnap an eastern European blond sex slave, buy a handful of Kalashnikov's in Bulgaria, buy some legal stocks with your black money in Austria, and sell your sex slave in a Dutch brothel, sell your weapons to some radicalized Muslims in Brussels and exchange your legal stocks for some British pounds in London, than it is to stream a freaking boring British TV show in France, even if the one who wants to stream the show is a Brit living in France.
Watch video streams? Are you crazy, you criminal?
Muslim immigrants? Well you take them and give them a warm welcome, and adapt to their culture, you racist.
The reason they've always given is that some of the stuff they broadcast is third party content for which they've only bought the rights to distribute within the UK. Apparently it's too much effort to set up a system whereby they classify content as "OK to distribute worldwide" vs "UK-only" and allow foreigners and ex-pats to watch the former category.
you should check your facts, Downton Abbey is not on the BBC
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Dump the licence fee, switch to subscription, sell BBC programming to anyone in the world who wants it, stop forcing people in the UK who don't want it to pay for it.
The BBC are adamant that they make the highest quality programmes in the world, so I'm sure they'll have no problem finding new subscribers to make up for lost licence revenue.
Yeah they should load up their websites and apps with ads instead!
What could possibly go wrong...
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
its probably the 3rd party that already has the rights sorted in those other countries and have a revenue stream from them, its probably more profitable for the 3rd party to have separate licences.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
They legally can't. The BBC has to pass the worldwide distribution rights of their shows to their for-profit arm BBC Worldwide which pays them ~20% of the revenues in return (the legal max due to how the BBC is funded). The BBC's special funding is also the source of a number of special headaches for them if the requirement for them to stay a non-profit were dropped they then could sell access worldwide. If you want to bitch about not gaining access iplayer bitch to BBC Worldwide that technically separate business that owns their worldwide rights.
What they don't get is people watch programming through the VPN because they have other way to get it.... If they spent half as much of this effort by negotiating with Netflix or Hulu for US customers to get these shows streamed we wouldn't care about VPNing them through iPlayer and still "paying for them..." It's just the typical ass-backwards corporate thinking at work.
The entire point of the license fee is that because everyone with a TV has to pay it (no matter their political affiliation), the BBC can be relatively unbiased in their reporting. The second you attach advertising or a subscription to it, they end up biased.
Probably this crack down is in preparation for BBC offering paid iPlayer access world-wide to a subset of the content. This is something I think a lot of people around the world have wanted for some time.
Yet still by a massive margin the least biased major news broadcaster in the English-speaking world.
The problem with that is that as soon as people can choose to pay it or not, the BBC has to pander to them to keep them paying - and they become biased. The reason that the BBC isn't as massively biased as CNN or Fox is because its funding is guaranteed, and it doesn't have to pander to audiences.
No - because then you have viewers choosing to pay or not pay the BBC. As soon as someone can make that choice, the BBC has to bias their broadcasting towards keeping that person paying, in order to keep their funding high. The whole point of the license fee is to avoid that situation.
BBC.
The BBC are indeed biased towards the Tory party. But it would be worse if the UK didn't have a public sector broadcaster. Look at Fox News!
Well rather less so since they sacked Jeremy Clarkson.
The "anyone who wants to pay" part is the problem. As soon as people can choose whether to pay or not (be they subscribers or advertisers), the BBC has to start tailoring their product to match the people making the choice to pay or not. As soon as that happens they have motivation to bias their reporting.
No, the BBC does a reasonable job of being unbiased. They don't get it right all the time, and certainly, in general they have a slight leftward lean, but they do a far far far better job than any channel beholden to people who can choose whether to pay or not. You only need to look at CNN's coverage of who won the democratic debate as an example of how bad it can get if you're beholden to people choosing to pay you.
Lasts time I read/watched Al Jazeera I thought Fox News or msnbc. Levels of bias. Some individual reporters were good but on a whole not really unbiased.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
In some cases that's true but the real reason is domestic politics. Here in Oz we have the ABC/SBS which is modelled on the BBC and is almost as old as the BBC. We used to have TV/Radio licenses when I was a kid in the 60's but we dumped them decades ago, it's an antiquated system based on the idea that TV/Radio's are a luxury item. People who pay license fees believe they own something and don't think others should get it for free (UK), people who pay for the same thing via taxes may object to doing so but do not care if others use it (AU).
As with the UK, the ABC/SBS is set up and run as an independent statutory body and is by far the most trusted news outlet in the country, this is despite recent attacks on its integrity from Murdoch's newspapers and his pet politicians. That tactic doesn't work very well with Aussie voters because most Aussies have seen the ABC attacked as biased by ALL sides of politics, its track record over the decades has earned our trust, we value its existance much more than the politicians who determine its budget.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I would agree that Al Jazeera does an excellent job on stories about most of the world. When covering the middle east, however, they are pretty much the official voice of the Muslim Brotherhood, being owned by the government of Qatar, and are about as biased as you can get.
The BBC are indeed biased towards the Tory party. But it would be worse if the UK didn't have a public sector broadcaster. Look at Fox News!
It's always hilarious to read about which way they think the BBC is biased. Just in this article alone the BBC has been accused of being both "biased towards the left" and "biased towards the Tories".
I think that might suggest more about the viewer than the organisation - in other words, that it is actually pretty balanced overall.
All media has bias. It's inherent in the role of choosing stories to emphasize and how to cover them. People naturally choose what interests them, what they think is important, etc... People generally don't recognize it when they mostly agree with the underlying premise it's based on and thus consider it reasonably "unbiased".
By default, I'd expect the BBC's reporters to have at least an "educated brit" bias, for example. Likely average left-wing politically (with probably a few noticeable exceptions, even more noticeable for their rarity) of the general population based on their chosen profession.
Insisting the BBC is unbiased says more about your own cultural background and personal biases than it does about the BBC. It's like the old joke about how the intelligence of someone is defined by how much they agree with me on everything...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Inter titles are the things they show between shows, like the channel branding or upcoming pieces for shows on the network.
On the iPlayer site (I live in the UK) these commercials are not present, nor are there any markers visible in the timeline that indicate where one would be. This was my confusion. I assume they appear in the same way that the ads do in youtube timelines?
If these are present in your version of iPlayer, I assume they are inserted by the vpn host or something? They are definitely not present in iPlayer as served up by the BBC in the UK.
They don't get it right all the time, and certainly, in general they have a slight leftward lean, but they do a far far far better job than any channel beholden to people who can choose whether to pay or not.
From my perspective, they don't have a leftward lean as much as they have an authoritarian, pro-government lean. That may have something to do with them being "beholden to people who can choose whether to pay or not."
Superficially, the left appears more authoritarian, but that's only because the right prefers to distribute the authority (and thus diffuse the accountability) through the private sector.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
I am a US citizen, born and raised. And I despise American TV.
It's SHIT. 98% of everything on US TV is shit. Plain and simple.
I subscribe to Dish AT250 and it's SHIT. So called "reality" shows.
The "Science" channel? Where's the science? A bunch of washed up entertainers reviewing youtube idiots, explaining why a shot to the nuts hurts.
The "Learning" channel? Really?
And on and on and on.. What pisses me off is that I have to subscribe to the top tier to get the slightly less shitty channels. $110 a month this costs me.
I also have Amazon Prime which I got for the shipping. I don't really find much to watch on there but I will be watching the Top Gear boys for sure.
I have Hulu Plus and Netflix. Meh.. I also allow my best friend to watch it so it gets some use.
I waited and waited for HBO NOW to come to Roku. I got tired of waiting and bought an Apple TV 3. About 2 months before they announced the ATV 4.
That's ok, I'm buying an ATV4 and a Roku 4 soon anyway. So Dish wanted $20 a month for HBO, that's what it cost me to watch Game of Thrones. As soon as the season was over I canceled it on Dish. Now I pay monthly and ongoing for HBO NOW through Apple. I watch it several times a week.
But overall, I'm extremely disappointed with American TV shows, movies and channels.
I've watched a LOT of BBC material and it's great. I love their science shows where they teach real science without hand puppets and crayons. Think Through the Wormhole with their idiotic animations. Brian Cox vs Morgan Freeman. WTF? Morgan Freeman is not a scientist. Not even a little. Also TTWH is always going on about the "god" thing which is extremely annoying. So much about that show is crap.
I know that there BBC TV License fee is £145.50 a year which is $224.64 in USD. $18.72 a month. If I could have full access to the BBC library through iPlayer I would be happy to pay them that. One thing to consider is that I wouldn't have access to live OTA TV like a resident would so perhaps bring the fee down a little. $15 a month for iPlayer only access would be more than fair and I would be more than happy to pay the BBC. And I don't want Americanized shows, I want pure British content. No American influence, no commercials, no banners covering the lower third of the screen with little people jumping up and down waving and blowing shit up to let me know about a different program coming up 2 months from now. Just the show. I love British humor, I love British culture. I want to see the world through their eyes and experience British life vicariously through Brits because there's a zero chance that I'll ever get to travel there much less live there.
I'm too tied down to life here (family and property) and I just can't travel. British television gives me the chance to learn new things and to see outside of the Americanized bubble that we are trapped in.