The other interesting thing along the ending of broadband is the phasing out of funding for local television.
""Provide greater freedom for the BBC to manage its own budgets by phasing out protected funding for broadband (£150 million a year) and local television (£5 million a year"
Yes, phasing out the funding of local tv but the introduction of an £8m per annum commitment for funding of local print journalists instead.
Having created an unnecessary 'local tv' industry they are bailing out now to focus on declining regional newspapers. Looks like a nail in the coffin for Local TV.
The closure of the 'iplayer loophole' was the most interesting point for me, mainly because whilst it's all fine and dandy to say 'we'll close it' in parliament, I can't think how on earth they could ever effectively enforce this.
If it requires registration, then it will surely be a simple matter for people to give the details of someone with a licence to get past it. If they plan to get around that by limiting the number of registered devices then that is surely unfair given that people can have an unlimited number of TVs on a single licence.
More stealthy methods like ISP records to check people have been using iplayer through a connection registered to a licenced address will be met with huge public outcry, and are utterly useless against someone accessing from a mobile device, using a public wifi connection, or using a VPN. If these are blocked (and I don't know how privately hosted VPNs can be blocked easily), well that is unfair to licence fee payers who can't access the service they have paid for from wherever they want. Will Capita's commission-based salespeople (sorry, I mean 'TV Licencing Officers') gain the right to check someone's browsing history to see if they've been on iplayer (also something easily covered up by someone with only a little technical knowledge)?
Also, it is specifically noted that people will need a TV Licence to access BBC programmes through on demand services, but not any other on demand service (pretty sure Netflix et all would play merry hell if they tried that). However, this will play into the hands of people who argue it is unfair to require someone to have a TV licence who doesn't watch any BBC channels now that on demand viewers would appear to effectively be able to treat the licence as a BBC subscription if they want to use iplayer but won't have to pay this if they only use other on demand services, whilst viewers on TV sets still have to cough up a licence for services they don't want.
I do think it is time to accept that the licence fee doesn't have a long term future, it was a solution for a different era which doesn't readily fit in to new technology, that the current 'iplayer loophole' exists at all proves that, and there doesn't seem to be any obvious way of implementing a closure of it which won't open up it's own hornet's nest of issues.
Personally, I think it should be just moved into general taxation so that everyone pays a bit for the BBC (but overall less than we do now). Before anyone talks about how that would undermine it's independence, the BBC already exists only because the government allows it to. Requiring the public to take out a licence and face criminal prosecution for being unlicensed when required to be so is a situation created by and maintained by the government for only as long as the government wants that system to stay in place. The government of recent years has already prevented licence fee increases, the government can at any point force a move on from the licence fee to other forms of funding, or withdraw all public funding if it wants to. The government already controls the BBC, removing the licence fee and replacing it with a grant from general taxation will change nothing.
I wonder if they'll merge the BBC ID and TV licence accounts purely for iPlayer?
Personally I think they'll go down the IP number route to check if it's UK based as now, rather than a strict enforcement of matching the IP to a licensed address with Netflix style blocks of VPN's and Smart DNS providers to stop people viewing from outside the UK. This won't stop ex-pats who watch using FilmOn or pirate live streams.
Personally I think they'll go down the IP number route to check if it's UK based as now
Ugh, great. Last time I checked we here in the Channel Islands still couldn't install iPlayer from the Google App Store without resorting to a UK VPN. Last I heard they were "working on it" as they had been for about three years.
Personally I think they'll go down the IP number route to check if it's UK based as now, rather than a strict enforcement of matching the IP to a licensed address with Netflix style blocks of VPN's and Smart DNS providers to stop people viewing from outside the UK. This won't stop ex-pats who watch using FilmOn or pirate live streams.
That's pretty much all you can do. As Cwathen says above, it's going to be pretty much impossible to police.
Remember that most domestic homes connect to the internet with a dynamic IP address. That means it changes near enough every time you connect to the internet. There is no "one IP to a specific address" thing (unless you pay extra for it), though of course the providers will know which account is connected with which IP address at any specific time - hence why PC Plod can trace people for inappropriate online behaviour...
I suspect the devil will be in the detail in the future, but at the moment I suspect the most that will happen is TV Licencing start sending out letters featuring the line "if you watch the iPlayer for catch-up programmes, you need a licence".
It won't be sustainable in the future, the licence fee as it stands. I think it was Greece that charges their licence fee through an excess on the electricity bill. We may end up having to move to a solution like that.
I'm not sure if it would ever be allowed, but could the BBC become part commercial?
Having programs sponsored but with no traditional adverts could work. I also think product placement is something the BBC should consider. It looks ridiculous having post it notes stuck on the back of MacBook's, Apple (or whoever) could instead become part of a scheme.
With regards to the iPlayer issue, could some sort of individual PIN number be given out to households?
It won't be sustainable in the future, the licence fee as it stands.
What makes you say that? The amount of TV licences in force in the UK has increased year on year for the last 15 years.
The most obvious reason a 'TV Licence' has no long term future is that as time goes on it has less and less to do with TV ownership or use of TV in the conventional way.
Quote:
I suspect the devil will be in the detail in the future, but at the moment I suspect the most that will happen is TV Licencing start sending out letters featuring the line "if you watch the iPlayer for catch-up programmes, you need a licence".
Please no! They surely won't go as far as a minor tweaking of TV licencing threat-o-grams! Not on top of the recent move to *DL Envelopes* to make them seem more important. 'The Legal Occupier' should be very, very scared indeed that 'Jane Powell' of the '<Insert vaguely nearest major city> Enforcement Divison' will have 'No Alternative but to proceed to the final stages of her investigation' and send an 'Enforcement Officer' round if this goes through!
Last edited by cwathen on 12 May 2016 9:35pm - 3 times in total
With regards to the iPlayer issue, could some sort of individual PIN number be given out to households?
Any piece of information or code or anything assigned to a particular address is liable to be stolen/misused/shared. Doesn't matter if its a PIN, a code, your TV licence number, email address, inside leg measurement or Great Uncle Quentin's role in the war - if it can be shared with somebody else without any other verification, it's open to abuse. That is the key factor. If it gets used by others, another piece of information would need generating to replace the compromised one.
I suspect the only real secure way of closing the IPlayer loophole is to do the two step verification thing that banks do - send a text message or email when you want to verify your ID. The possible other option that's just occurred to me is possibly through the Government Gateway thing that you sign into when you want a passport - sign into that, hook into TV Licensing, is there a licence, yes, here's last night's EastEnders, otherwise go away. But again, the log-in details for that can be stolen... See what I'm getting at here?
It won't be sustainable in the future, the licence fee as it stands.
What makes you say that? The amount of TV licences in force in the UK has increased year on year for the last 15 years.
It wasn't the numbers I was referring to. The charge structure will probably have to change. There may come a point where it's better to collect the licence fee through, say, the electricity bills like they do in Greece as a levy.
With regards to the iPlayer issue, could some sort of individual PIN number be given out to households?
Any piece of information or code or anything assigned to a particular address is liable to be stolen/misused/shared. Doesn't matter if its a PIN, a code, your TV licence number, email address, inside leg measurement or Great Uncle Quentin's role in the war - if it can be shared with somebody else without any other verification, it's open to abuse. That is the key factor. If it gets used by others, another piece of information would need generating to replace the compromised one.
I suspect the only real secure way of closing the IPlayer loophole is to do the two step verification thing that banks do - send a text message or email when you want to verify your ID. The possible other option that's just occurred to me is possibly through the Government Gateway thing that you sign into when you want a passport - sign into that, hook into TV Licensing, is there a licence, yes, here's last night's EastEnders, otherwise go away. But again, the log-in details for that can be stolen... See what I'm getting at here?
A possible solution to that problem would be a maximum of 5 devices allowed per PIN number, and only 3 people using the service with the same PIN at one time. I think Now TV use a similar system.
With regards to the iPlayer issue, could some sort of individual PIN number be given out to households?
Any piece of information or code or anything assigned to a particular address is liable to be stolen/misused/shared. Doesn't matter if its a PIN, a code, your TV licence number, email address, inside leg measurement or Great Uncle Quentin's role in the war - if it can be shared with somebody else without any other verification, it's open to abuse. That is the key factor. If it gets used by others, another piece of information would need generating to replace the compromised one.
I suspect the only real secure way of closing the IPlayer loophole is to do the two step verification thing that banks do - send a text message or email when you want to verify your ID. The possible other option that's just occurred to me is possibly through the Government Gateway thing that you sign into when you want a passport - sign into that, hook into TV Licensing, is there a licence, yes, here's last night's EastEnders, otherwise go away. But again, the log-in details for that can be stolen... See what I'm getting at here?
A possible solution to that problem would be a maximum of 5 devices allowed per PIN number, and only 3 people using the service with the same PIN at one time. I think Now TV use a similar system.
NOW TV allow up to four registered devices and one change of device per month per account. This was agreed with the distributors of the programme content.
Actually, the solution may have just occurred to me.
Windows 10 uses digital licences to activate itself based on the hardware, which is why you don't need product keys to reinstall them later if you upgraded to it and need to reload it in the future.
It should be possible for an iPlayer app/program/solution/whatever to generate a digital ID in the same way as Windows 10, match it to the hardware/device being used and then link that to either an address or the TV licence number (itself matched to an address already). Then when you go to watch iPlayer, it would after checking the UK IP address, verify via add-in or whatever to the online database and if the hardware matches the ID, you can watch. If it doesn't, you can't. Like with Windows, a change in hardware requires a new activation of the software. A new device for iPlayer could re-authenticate itself automatically if, say, there are less than three or four devices already registered.
I can't think of a downside here, short of having your laptop nicked in order to watch iPlayer, but I'm sure there is one.