BBC iPlayer to go international?

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 27 October 2009 07:39

Your IT - Home IT

But stations in other countries that buy BBC shows may sit on them for weeks, months and in some cases years before broadcasting them. If the BBC releases content globally as soon as it has been shown in the UK, that would reduce their value to foreign networks.

In the last year or two, there has been a general tendency to show popular and potentially popular series closer to their original screenings in their home country (the so-called fast-track strategy) as a way of discouraging downloads via BitTorrent.

The question facing the BBC is whether the income received directly from overseas iPlayer users would offset any drop in foreign licensing revenue.

Furthermore, not all of the material on iPlayer is owned by the BBC. It isn't hard to imagine that programs from overseas would be restricted to domestic iPlayer users to avoid a similar reduction in the value of licensing rights to other broadcasters around the world.

(Hulu - the advertising-supported TV replay site owned by NBC Universal, News Corp, Disney and others - similarly restricts access to US residents. Earlier this year, News Corp chief digital officer Jonathan Miller implied that Hulu users could be asked to pay for content.)

There have also been suggestions that the international iPlayer service would include content from other UK broadcasters such as Channel 4.

But BBC officials last week said their proposals to license iPlayer technologies to third parties (possibly including BBC Worldwide) and to form the 'Open iPlayer Federation' with other public-sector broadcasters (notably Channel 4) had been rejected by the BBC Trust.

That didn't mark the end of the story for an international service - see page 3.