The BBC are fucking twats though.
OVerseas, there are what 5 million British people? Why in the name of fuckity fuck can't it allow British people overseas to pay to use iplayer? Say they had to pay 13 quid a month, which I in China gladly would have done, imagine the funds they could pull in. Instead, no they block it overseas and whinge on about rights restrictions bullshit. Twits.
And then there are many millions more who do respect the BBC and who want to learn English, especially in places like China, and would love to use those services.
So on the one hand, they gibber on about rights restrictions, and on the other, they come up with stuff like saying British people in the UK should pay for iplayer on top of the licence fee...
They're so out of touch it's untrue....
They do have a point about rights issues.
They might be perfectly happy to permit people outside the UK to view BBC in house programmes.
Or then again, permitting people to do so might scupper their chances of being able to sell some of their programmes to broadcasters in other countries, and therefore earn revenues that get ploughed back into the budget.
But they do have to respect the rights of producers of other programmes regarding their acquisitions. If the BBC wants to screen a documentary or a drama series or a film made externally, they don't actually buy the right to upload it to the internet and let people all around the world watch it.
The BBC don't buy the programme or film or whatever in it's entirety, they simply buy the right to broadcast it in the UK and maybe put it on iPlayer for the domestic audience.
It's like the difference between, say, The Beatles back catalogue, didn't Michael Jackson buy it? Now, he could licence use of tracks to, say, films or adverts or whatever, because he owned the intellectual property.
If you're, say, a film student, just buying a CD doesn't really give you the right to use it in a film and then show that film, because you haven't bought the rights to do so.
It's the same for the BBC, they don't own the intellectual property of external acquisitions, they simply buy a limited right to use it. If they wanted unrestricted rights, it would mean instead of say, paying for the equivalent of a CD, or like a pub landlord paying for the PRS licence, they would have to do the equivalent of buying the actual 'back catalogue' the intellectual property rights to the whole programme for uploading to the internet and being accessible to a global audience. And that would be much, much more expensive.
It's not them being arsey or mean to British expats living abroad. It's intellectual property rights and costs.
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