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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."
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
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.
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.
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.