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

[James Scholes]

The BBC have spent many years building their streaming infrastructure,
and that includes a huge amount of effort in recent years to:

* Launch the BBC Nitro API;
* Widely deploy HLS streamms;
* Start deploying MPEG DASH streams, which still is not complete but is
ongoing;
* Build SAML-based authentication into their mediaselector API for use
by the BBC Store;
* More internal or minor projects which we don't yet know about.

I have a hard time believing that the BBC would throw all of that away
and leave it to a third party company to implement.  Just imagine how
many millions have already gone into those projects I listed above?

Granted, on the user interface/experience side of things, they will have
to implement changes.  But get_iplayer has never bothered itself with
how the BBC's websites/apps look.  And no matter what they do, network
traffic can always be sniffed from their apps to work out what is going
on if they do lock things down.  So I think we're jumping to conclusions
based on a very vaguely-worded document.
-- 
James Scholes
http://twitter.com/JamesScholes