dinosaur

...at least according to ars technica.

robin1234

Does the BBC have some kind of subscription access to iPlayer for those living abroad? If so folks living abroad could pay to support the service, like UK based TV Licence payers..

Nutek

Whack-A-Mole

sir_eccles

There was another thread recently suggesting such a service is in the works.

http://britishexpats.com/forum/trail...ice-us-865397/

hungryhorace

Complete nonsense. What they're actually doing is blocking the UK IPs of a few popular VPN hosting services.

Unless the BBC has a way to assess whether a packet has previously been routed through a 'VPN' (a hilarious assertion), then I'm afraid they're SOL.

mrken30

there may be a way to track how many sessions are coming from a single IP. Most household would have less than 10. A VPN provider may have several hundred depending on the user base. This approach would cause issues for hotels and employers, but maybe they would use a white list approach.

steveq

Seems they're blocking IP ranges of known VPN providers.

mrken30

I'm assuming the VPN providers will just get new IP address ranges. Not sure how easy that is.

BristolUK

From the linked article
So if accessing within the UK (for privacy reasons) is no problem and the BBC thinks the vast majority of users are doing just that, why are they trying to block that small minority?

mrken30

and spending how much public money?

hungryhorace

Would potentially work, but you would cut out a lot of legitimate users. Plus, whose paying for this complete waste of time anyway? The British tax payer - under pain of jail! It's a disgrace.

hungryhorace

Within IPv4 space - not as easy as you would imagine now.
Within IPv6 space - there are a undecillion of network addresses free.

username.exe

Because BBC Worldwide is supposed to be commercialising BBC productions outside of the UK, and reinvesting the profits into the public services side.

Presumably their business model thinks that it's worth spending money blocking VPNs, thereby people outside the UK will be forced to purchase that content through a BBC America subscription or some other means.

Unfortunately, this won't work because the BBC hasn't made that material easily available, although I believe there will be an online 'store' at some point in the near future.

BristolUK

But they are saying the vast majority of those doing what the BBC doesn't want them to do are not worldwide. It must be so small a number as to be a waste of time. Unless....

I've no idea how much it will cost but perhaps they are willing to spend whatever it is because it is a bigger problem than they admit.

amideislas

If they'd just give up on the whole tv licence notion, then they wouldn't have to enforce it. I have no doubt BBC could do very well on its own - internationally. Probably better...