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Following the recent closure of a legal loophole that meant the UK's TV license only applied to live-streaming of BBC content on the iPlayer (meaning you didn't need a £145.50 license to watch catch-up programs), the BBC has announced that it will be requiring all users to log in to view programs from 2017.
All users of the BBC's iPlayer service will have to log in with a personal account from early 2017.
Users of BBC services can already create an online account - known as a BBC ID - but this is not currently required in order to access iPlayer.
In another change, from Tuesday BBC ID holders will have to add a postcode to their account information.
The BBC says the information won't be used for [license] enforcement - but adds it may be in the future.
With young people watching less and less "live" TV, the key to ensuring they are even aware of what is on offer is to find out who's watching, track their tastes and try to tempt them with programmes that reflect their age and where they live.
It's unclear at this point how this will affect people using the get_iplayer script to download programs without requiring Adobe Flash / Air, but I'm confident the maintainers will find a way to keep going.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by theluggage on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:49PM
How will this affect smart TVs? What about youview? I can see this breaking iPlayer on a lot of existing equipment.
I'm sure that YouView and the main PC, Mac, iOS and Android iPlayer apps will get updated (maybe even in time for the change... although that may be a triumph of optimism over experience). Even the BBC should be able to figure out that they'll need to update the clients.
The problem is going to be the abandonware SmartTV functionality built into your 3+ year old TV or BluRay player now that the manufacturer has moved on to their shiny new EvenSmarterTV platform. However, I'm sure that most people here have worked out that having quickly outdated 'smarts' embedded in an expensive screen that'll be good for 10+ years is a dumb idea and, instead, rely on The iPlayer in my 6-year-old SmartTV has long since ceased to function, and the tumbleweed is blowing through the deserted streets of its app store...