Tim Worstall

The BBC and iPlayer

Many will welcome this:

Viewers will be able to watch BBC programmes on the internet under the terms of a new service agreed yesterday.

The
iPlayer website will allow users to download any programme shown on BBC
television or radio up to a week after transmission and give them
another 30 days to watch or listen to it on their computers.

However, there’s something of a fly in the ointment. As your computer, or indeed your 3G mobile phone, will now be regarded as a device capable of receiving the BBC’s output, this means that such devices will require a TV licence.

Most will of course already have a TV licence, as you only need one per household. But those who have no TV will now also need one, if they have an internet connected computer, of a state of the art telephone.

Even visitors to the country with a laptop would need one.

While viewing of traditional television channels steadily declines, the
corporation wants to find new ways of delivering its content to
maintain its "reach" and justify the licence fee.

Quite, it’s a bureaucracy trying to make sure that it survives. Any machine that is capable of playing these downloaded shows will require a licence. A nice extension of their powers, don’t you think?

In

2 responses

  1. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    The powers were changed a few years back for the watching of TV in “near real time”. AFAIK no-one is claiming that a PC + broadband is automatically capable of doing this and requires a TV licence.
    In any case, the iPlayer doesn’t allow TV to be watched in near real-time (i.e. shifted by seconds, not by hours or days) so doesn’t count as a TV receiver.
    Tim adds: Presumably that’s why they’re doing this then:
    “The BBC will also “simulcast” its TV channels online, meaning that people will be able to watch them on any computer with a broadband internet connection.”

    Reply
  2. Kay Tie Avatar
    Kay Tie

    “The BBC will also “simulcast” its TV channels online”
    No, that’s just what the Telegraph wrote. The BBC Trust set conditions on how the technology must work (e.g. platform neutral, not restricted to Windows). They specifically set no conditions on simulcast and they certainly did not say “it will do simulcast”.
    The BBC iPlayer technology as proposed is a P2P technology that allows programmes to be downloaded. There’s a world of difference between downloading and viewing later, viewing in real-time as it is downloaded, and viewing a programme live as it is broadcast. The first is a snip (it is what Bittorrent does for all those episodes of South Park and Lost), the second is much harder, and is what YouTube does (although not in very high resolution, you’ll note), and the third is what no-one can yet do reliably without controlling the network (it’s what BT is slowly rolling out).
    It’s possible, just possible, that they’ve talked up “simulcast” in order to catch people in TV licensing dragnet. Ordinarily I’d have said no, but today is the 10th anniversary of the accession to power of the most mendacious Government in modern times, so cynicism is the order of the day.

    Reply

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