uk_grenada

Its devious because its illegal, they are actively blocking vpn’s as they are identified and have introduced ‘poison pill’ tech for the iplayer clients identified.

Its also not their issue. The copyright holders often arent them, and they require steps to avoid theft of their IP. How can they sell a prog to a country broadcaster where everyone has already watched the prog. Now currently they actually pretty much regard it as a loss leader getting interest for the prog, some makers have been accused eg of spreading torrent downloads of their own progs, but if its popularity grows as was happening with some services like android boxes, they fight back.

Expect more battles, the war will continue, but dont assume you’ll always win, especially if you have a specific need like iplayer - that they can control - i know they could make it bullet proof if wanted simply by requiring you to specify your ip address, linking it to your login, then blocking it if its owned by a vpn or has more than x streaming devices behind it. What protects you is currently its not worth it to chase you, but if budgets squeeze and they get some agreenent [not going to happen] with the ip owners to charge people abroad...

BristolUK

Yes, but when I google 'devious' it also makes reference to showing a skillful use of underhanded tactics...More crafty, cunning, calculating...longer and less direct than the most straightforward way.
That's why I feel it overstates two clicks of a mouse.
But they often are and probably 90% of the time.
All arguments used in the music biz and they eventually adapted to the changing world.

French TV makes the excellent Spiral/Engrenages and sells it to the BBC. If BBC makes it available via iPlayer then the French TV company can adjust the price accordingly.

I'm not sure how much people using iPlayer from anywhere in the world to access Spiral is going to negatively impact French sales to, say, the Spanish speaking world. But then they could set up their own subscription service couldn't they? Or use Netflix or similar. It's already happening.

Does BBC have any difficulty selling output to the rest of the world? Does French TV have trouble getting the BBC to buy Spiral? I don't see too much difficulty in Scandi drama making it to foreign shores.

Quite likely that illicit access to things has actually increased a level of demand not previously there.

That's the thing, I don't.

It's handy for watching Saturday's MOTD on delay and fast forwarding through bits I saw live, but I can do the same thing a bit later on an alternative site - or even on Canadian TV, I just like the BBC presentation.

I mentioned the series Rellik as an example of how some things are just as accessible on alternatives.

There's one advantage to iPlayer and that's not needing an adblocker to take care of things popping up, but it's really no hardship to close the odd one.
Is that like being able to buy individual recordings instead of a full LP and making your own legal compilations was never going to happen?

uk_grenada

Its not how much illegal use goes on, its that they the bbc must be seen to be taking effective action.

Dont assume because the bbc logo is on the prog they own it, they often only own the uk rights in joint productions like david attenboroughs wildlife stuff or hbo joint dranas or some bbc movies.

Its nothing like streaming music at all. A person i know is the head lawyer working for the trade body of the indie music labels in europe. Their issue was just getting paid, the need was for an all encompassing agreement for a large no of companies. They love streaming an 1p per click. The tv producers want to give time based rights - to show a prog during a year once or repeated x times so the vehicle changes over time AND carries advertising most of the time. Are you also aware that streaming services for music are also geotagged? Spotify in some countries stops working after 2 weeks abroad, they sensibly incorporated holidays... and the uk license doesnt appear to stop ever - yet - but its in the software and affects some countries because the licensing isnt free... https://community.spotify.com/t5/Acc...s/td-p/1075083

Oakvillian

...and at some point in the next 30 years or so, the broadcast industry will be dragged kicking and screaming into 2012.

It's all exactly the same arguments as had been used by RIAA against Napster, by MPAA against bittorrent, by any geographically-minded licensing authority against Netflix and others who have been "persuaded" to geotag content and/or geoblock service delivery.

It is not an argument the rights holders can possibly win in the long term. The world shrinks. The idea of licensing content separately in many geographies is a dead idea. The sooner production companies and broadcasters realize this the better for everyone. Otherwise it's a perpetual game of cat-and-mouse with DNS services, VPNs, other technology workarounds that will always be half a step ahead of any enforcement efforts.

The BBC will continue to generate revenue from foreign sales, and will continue to be able to share production costs through international co-production agreements. But to imagine that they will be able to prevent individual consumers from streaming their services to any device anywhere in the world is naive in the extreme: efforts at prevention are not only doomed to failure, they're a dead waste of time, effort and money to boot.

Greater emphasis should instead be placed on attempts to monetize the inevitable, rather than hold back the tide of consumer demand.

BristolUK

That wasn't my point.

The record companies used to object to people taping LPs. They went to great lengths, spending money on campaigns and attempts to treat cassette tapes so they wouldn't produce a good recording. Counter arguments were that people were making their own personal copies of LPs they had bought and that it was reasonable for them to do so. If someone did get a recording off someone else they were more likely to make a purchase later of something they'd not otherwise bought or pay to see the artist's gig.

It was also considered unfair that the only way to legitimately obtain copies of the one or two songs one wanted was to by the whole LP.

So now we have a system where the music biz has changed and instead of fighting it they joined it and now do things like sell individual songs. They sell what people want rather than what they want to sell.

Streaming TV generates a whole new level of interest and the BBC could join this new world instead of fighting against it.

MarkG

Maybe they could, you know, just let people pay them to watch it, rather than trying to maintain a 1970s geo-locked business model.

Just a thought.

Former Lancastrian

Its the UK you know and if they are behind the 8 ball god knows what Canada should or will be doing.

BristolUK

Canada doesn't make much worth selling.

The Romeo Section was the last good series and that was best since The Border.

uk_grenada

Understanding of what is called 'the food chain' used by TV and movie producers is important to why these companies do as they do. When I used to work (ran global tv IT) at Disney this was all explained to me in terms of how one made vast sums from a movie over a 5 to 10 year period.

It starts with the first cinematic release then goes on to pay-per-view, selling to TV companies for limited periods online box sets etc whilst all the while selling add-ons like fluffy toys or online games or console-based games which of course can be worth more than the movie. Great example is the Lion King which cost $150 million but made 20 times that much - most of which however was not from the movie itself.

Disney always realised that what was important was the content not the delivery mechanism and as a result everytime the delivery mechanism changes they sell the same old back catalogue stuff again partially to new set of parents. (which is why you don't see Disney old movies much in forms that you can readily copy, NB the release schedule on DVD or Blu-ray for the older movies was about a 20 year period - longer than the format itself survived.)

SO they will do whatever they can to make you pay something everytime you watch whatever it is BUT they wish to extract the maximum amount of money from you and they know that some countries will pay more than others and this is a differential they will try to maintain.

Here's an interesting yet useless fact, you know that cinematic releases are sometimes delayed all over the globe so for example movie will come out in America a month before it comes out in Europe a month before it comes out in Australia a month before or six months before itcomes out Africa.

Occasionally there is a reasonable marketing reason for this but the real reason is historical, when movies came out on celluloid a copy of the movie was worth about £500 nobody wants to waste money by making too many copies, so what used to actually happen was that the American physical films would be watched in America then sent to Europe for viewing later which is why the quality or the number of scratches would be worse in Europe then from Europe they would be sent elsewhere. There are also things called showreels which are very high-quality copies made in a different way, used to show critics and also the staff of the companies. The technical quality of those is absolutely fantastic, better than any so-called high-definition digital copy, viewed in an in-house Disney cinema with an unlimited budget spent on the projection / audio hardware is a real experience.

Of course today movies are all-digital and sent down lines as such, as an anti-copying measure the delays have all but gone.

uk_grenada

Also don't forget that geo-locking is alive and well in America, where for example HBO strictly maintain this on their own content.

BristolUK

It would seem that BBC has finally caught up with Hoxx (the free one anyway).
They say they are working on it (we'll see) but it still works for ITV and C4.

A week ago ago I sat down to watch episode 2 of Peaky Blinders on iPlayer (having seen ep1 on it the previous week) to find it blocked. Ah well, I just went onto watch-series and saw it there instead. Top quality and subtitle options too.

This morning I was up for the Rugby League World Cup Final which I planned to watch on one of the FilmOn options that still seemed to be working without the time limit, having used it last week, but it was limited to a minute or two and when that stopped, it needed backclicking to get a couple of minutes again.

Couldn't be arsed with that so went to one of 20 or 30 alternative streaming sights in my bookmarks and watched it there instead.

Partially discharged

I use 'Beebs' via the Google Chrome store which was free when I signed up but is now a pay option.

Last week, twice I logged in on the BBC Iplayer site and got the 'hey you're not in the UK' notice and thought the free ride was over.

Then about a day later it seemed to be fixed and since then it has been fine. Yesterday I got an email saying

"Hello

We're working hard to get things up and running again.
Hopefully all our changes have successfully now beaten the recent blocks we've seen.

If you have premium, please reply with your postal/zip code of your card and we'll refund you the last 2 months as a sorry for the outage.

Please bear with us and thanks for emailing in!

If you head over to Beebs, and press the Chrome Icon in the toolbar and that will refresh your cookies and make sure you have access.

It it works, please rate us in the Chrome store!

Phew, now we can get some rest."

BristolUK

There was something about chrome that put me off but I don't remember what.

I do enjoy firefox but the latest version has disabled two add-ons which I cannot be without. One of them - the choice of automatically opening a new tab or automatically opening in the current tab seems so basic that it should be a settable option on every browser.

I also notice Hoxx is a different version needed for new FF and I wonder if this new version of Hoxx is what gives the game away to the BBC. It only happened after, but that could just be coincidence.

If I return to the previous version of FF - which is quite likely in a few days depending how many people I've killed going postal - then I may find out.

Either way it's just so easy to find an alternative to VPN/iPlayer. But you can't have too many options and it's nice to have spares.

Come on BBC, just charge the sort of fee that thousands of people are paying anyway. Stop wasting resources and increase revenue.

BristolUK

All working fine again tonight. Looks like hoxx fixed it.

BristolUK

Apparently there is something called Britbox that enables legal streaming of UK TV in the USA and it's to be extended to Canada.
So what happened about to those claims of broadcast rights preventing them running a subscription service?