BBC iPlayer viewers now need a TV licence to watch to catch up with their favourite shows

[Kevin Lynch]

The "problem" from BBC revenue collection point of view is that
"students" and other licence "abstainers" are using the catchup
iplayer loophole to forego paying the licence fee. The way the system
works today is that they assume everyone in the country has to have a
licence and then they send people to check out the deniers. As part of
the "negotiations" the government was even proposing to make it a
civil rather than criminal offence to not have a TV licence. This
would have diminished the stick for people who don't pay TV licence
and caused the BBC to lose revenue and increase cost of revenue
collection.  I think that is the simplest and most cost effective way
of doing it today given the current regulatory/technical
infrastructure and focus on cost of operation.

I don't think the proposed changes will have any short to medium term
impact on GiP.

In the announcement it is proposed that the licence fee system will be
extended another 11 years. Towards the end I could imagine that they
would pilot some business process to migrate licence fee payers to
"family" or "household" subscriptions (like today's
iTunes/Google/Microsoft/Netflix subscription plans). This would
probably require primary legislation at the time.

The clues that these changes  would be coming would be a requirement
to use a BBC id to access iPlayer content. The tieing of the id to a
licence fee, restricting devices per BBC id. Given the knowhow and
expertise of contributors here. We'll have at least 12-36 months of
these sorts of changes/

regards

Kevin

On 13 May 2016 at 17:33, James Scholes <james at jls-radio.com> wrote:
> CJB wrote:
>> ... snip ...
>
> All very good content, but I fail to see how it answers, or even
> addresses, the OP's question.  From a purely technical point of view, he
> was interested whether new measures to prevent viewers from watching the
> iPlayer without a valid TV license would have an impact on the
> downloading of programs with get_iplayer.  The possible lockdown of BBC
> streams has very little to do with politics and highjacking the thread
> is just bad form, even if the content is worthy of attension.
> --
> James Scholes
> http://twitter.com/JamesScholes
>
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