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> iPlayer was, after all, one of the first streaming services: a genuine bit of innovation from the Beeb. This is absolutely worth remembering, iPlayer was rev

> iPlayer was, after all, one of the first streaming services: a genuine bit of innovation from the Beeb. This is absolutely worth remembering, iPlayer was revelatory 12 or 13 years ago. Infuriatingly the innovation seems to have stopped there. Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot, instead you're mainly limited to items shown in the last month, plus some randomly curated stuff. Channel 4 has a better online archive. When I lived outside of the UK I would have paid a subscription fee equal to the licence fee to gain access to iPlayer. It's worth paying for! But there's no way to give them money for services other than be a licence payer within the UK.

deadbunny 5y ago
> Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. This was due to the Competition Commission saying the BBC putting up their back catalogue would stifle competition.
- chuckee 5y ago
  Sounds like internal sabotage.
asdff 5y ago
Isn't it because they don't physically have a lot of the back catalogue anymore? I read that they taped over a lot of shows and there aren't copies left for some.
kmeisthax 5y ago
>You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot I hate to break it to you, but not even the BBC has that. Most of their early work was never archived, as the technology to actually do so either didn't exist (television predates magnetic video recording), was so expensive as to make full archival prohibitively expensive, or was explicitly prohibited by contractual arrangement. No, seriously, TV actors insisted that tapes were wiped and reused after a period of time so that reruns would not usurp the market for new productions. The same goes for a lot of other countries' early television. Just finding working copies of all of those Doctor Who episodes is an ongoing preservation project. Things like not being able to pay for iPlayer outside of the license fee is a similar problem - politics dictating the market. The BBC's license-funded activities are specifically firewalled from the part of the business that sells commercial TV internationally. Even if that particular diktat didn't exist, the BBC would still be following the ordinary TV business practice of selling each show off on a per-country basis. Even the big streaming services do this with their own originals, many of which are not streaming-exclusive outside the US. The idea that you have a single "owner" that just does everything and sells the work globally is mostly unheard of outside of the videogame industry.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
Bluecobra 5y ago
> When I lived outside of the UK I would have paid a subscription fee equal to the licence fee to gain access to iPlayer. It's worth paying for! But there's no way to give them money for services other than be a licence payer within the UK. This drove me nuts! There were a bunch of great series I was into that were simply not available in US even if I purchased a premium cable subscription to BBC America. Another show (programme?) I really enjoyed was Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. The UK version was much better than the over the top version we got on FOX in the US. I ended up paying for a cheap VPC in the UK that I would SSH into and use it as a SOCKS proxy so I can watch the shows I wanted. I would have gladly given BBC/Channel 4 money if I could.

deadbunny 5y ago

> Case in point, it's a corporation nearly 100 years old, yet its back catalogue is extremely poor. This was due to the Competition Commission saying the BBC putting up their back catalogue would stifle competition.

chuckee 5y ago
Sounds like internal sabotage.

asdff 5y ago

Isn't it because they don't physically have a lot of the back catalogue anymore? I read that they taped over a lot of shows and there aren't copies left for some.

kmeisthax 5y ago

>You should be able to watch every episode of Doctor Who on demand since the original black & white pilot I hate to break it to you, but not even the BBC has that. Most of their early work was never archived, as the technology to actually do so either didn't exist (television predates magnetic video recording), was so expensive as to make full archival prohibitively expensive, or was explicitly prohibited by contractual arrangement. No, seriously, TV actors insisted that tapes were wiped and reused after a period of time so that reruns would not usurp the market for new productions. The same goes for a lot of other countries' early television. Just finding working copies of all of those Doctor Who episodes is an ongoing preservation project. Things like not being able to pay for iPlayer outside of the license fee is a similar problem - politics dictating the market. The BBC's license-funded activities are specifically firewalled from the part of the business that sells commercial TV internationally. Even if that particular diktat didn't exist, the BBC would still be following the ordinary TV business practice of selling each show off on a per-country basis. Even the big streaming services do this with their own originals, many of which are not streaming-exclusive outside the US. The idea that you have a single "owner" that just does everything and sells the work globally is mostly unheard of outside of the videogame industry.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

Bluecobra 5y ago

> When I lived outside of the UK I would have paid a subscription fee equal to the licence fee to gain access to iPlayer. It's worth paying for! But there's no way to give them money for services other than be a licence payer within the UK. This drove me nuts! There were a bunch of great series I was into that were simply not available in US even if I purchased a premium cable subscription to BBC America. Another show (programme?) I really enjoyed was Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. The UK version was much better than the over the top version we got on FOX in the US. I ended up paying for a cheap VPC in the UK that I would SSH into and use it as a SOCKS proxy so I can watch the shows I wanted. I would have gladly given BBC/Channel 4 money if I could.