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BBC to Require Users to Log in to Access iPlayer From 2017

posted by janrinok on Tuesday September 27 2016, @03:31PM   
from the hammer-falls dept.

kazzie writes:

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.

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Original Submission

• This is a taxThis is a tax (Score: 2) by richtopia on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:17PM

  by richtopia (3160) on Tuesday September 27 2016, @04:17PM (#406998) Homepage Journal

  I'm an American so I cannot use the iplayer anyway. At first this sounded expensive (iplayer is now requiring 145GBP every year for video content. It looks like Netflix in the UK charges 6GBP/month (72GBP/year) for comparison), but I happened to look at wikipedia for how the BBC is funded. The 145GBP is a television license charged from every household with a television.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC#Revenue [wikipedia.org]

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• Re:This is a tax(Score: 2) by kazzie on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:23PM

  by kazzie (5309) on Tuesday September 27 2016, @07:23PM (#407073)

  My apologies, I wasn't clear enough in the summary that the £145 covers all television/video use (and also funds radio, education programmes, etc). I am personally of the view that the BBC license fee offers excellent value for money.

  A lot of people in the UK refer to the license fee derogatively as a tax, but it technically isn't, because the money doesn't go to the government: it goes straight to the BBC instead.

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• Re:This is a taxRe:This is a tax (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Wednesday September 28 2016, @08:59AM

  by TheRaven (270) on Wednesday September 28 2016, @08:59AM (#407292) Journal

  It's hard to claim it's a tax, when you can avoid it by not consuming the thing that it covers. I hadn't watched live TV for a while when they introduced iPlayer and I stopped paying the license fee in protest against them using proprietary technology that used public funds to distort the market. I almost started again when get_iplayer started working, but didn't because the BBC intentionally broke it several times. I actually haven't watched anything from iPlayer for a few months either, so when they changed the rules we decided not to bother with a license. If they'd make everything available using open standards and allow any third parties (not just those who agree binary-only distribution of trivially circumventable DRM that serves solely to limit interoperability) then I'd start paying the fee again. Until then, I won't pay the BBC to endorse specific vendors.

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  • Re: This is a tax(Score: 2) by gidds on Wednesday September 28 2016, @12:22PM

    by gidds (589) on Wednesday September 28 2016, @12:22PM (#407350)

    It's hard to claim it's a tax, when you can avoid it by not consuming the thing that it covers.

    Eh?  It would make just as little sense to say "It's hard to claim that Income Tax is a tax, when you can avoid it by not having any income.", or "It's hard to claim that Capital Gains Tax is a tax, when you can avoid it by not gaining any capital."

    In fact, according to Wikipedia the TV Licence fee is a tax — but differs from most taxes in that it's raised for a particular defined purpose.  It's collected by the BBC but paid into the Government's Consolidated Fund, and passed back to the BBC from there.

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