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

[Ian Trimnell]

A very interesting perspective.  We don't have a TV license because we don't have a television nor do we watch live broadcasts on any computer or mobile device.  This is all in line with the reasons set out on the form that TV Licensing send us every now and then.

We only download, either using iPlayer or get_iplayer, the few programs we are really interested in.  Sometimes this may be as few a two or three a week.

Therefore, I am quite interested in knowing how long we have before we will not be able to watch those few programs.  We don't really think that we will want to spend the money on a license so would rather go without.

I do wonder how much extra income, over the additional costs involved, the BBC will actually gain.

Anyway, this is starting to get off topic again so I'll sign off.

Ian
(No television for over 35 years.)


> On 14 May 2016, at 15:33, Kevin Lynch <klynchk at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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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