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General discussion

IT Crowd... Hope this isn't where IPTV is heading

Feb 13, 2006 9:15PM PST

Cmon now... whats up with IT Crowd only being viewable from UK?!?! Is this where IPTV is heading? Region restrictions. This show is absolutely HILL-arious... am i forced to now download it off the "scene" now?

Big Bag of Suck...

crow

Discussion is locked

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Distribution Rights
Feb 13, 2006 9:50PM PST

This isn't so much about where IPTV is headed as how content is paid for currently. In the UK anyone with a TV pays a tax to fund BBC broadcasts. So unless a US company has purchased distribution rights it's not surprising that you can't watch a UK show, no matter the transmission medium.

International distribution can be tricking, but that's different than the arbitrary region codes the DVD folks invented to allow them to sell the same content to different areas for different prices at different times.

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Nothing to do with IPTV....
Feb 14, 2006 7:22AM PST

.... and everything to do with 19th century business tactics. If you ran a business, would you not want to sell a product once, twice or more, with different prices paid in each place you sell it, sometimes more or less for no good reason? but seriously, the inclusion of only UK based persons for this product comes down to who has paid for it to be produced - UK license payers (effectively a tax paid by everyone in the UK to support the production of high quality programming). So, it is not completely arbitrary - unlike region encoding of DVDs and Computer games. For once though it is UK that gets it first, rather than the US.

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Work around
Feb 14, 2006 7:33AM PST

find yourself a free UK proxy server and use it to watch UK content.

I use them alot to view US content. Happy

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Bittorrent
Feb 14, 2006 2:36PM PST

You can BitTorrent the shows, as well as use the direct link in the browser address bar.

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The BBC Licence Fee
Feb 14, 2006 7:50AM PST

UK residents pay a licence fee for owning a television. This money is used to fund the BBC. The BBC does not have commerical advertisements.

Channel 4 is a separate UK channel that receives no money from the licence fee. Instead it uses commercial advertising to fund its programming. If they are restricting distribution of this programme, it will be for reasons other than the licence fee.

There has been a lot of debate about keeping the licence fee in the UK in recent years. For the moment they have decided to keep it.

Note to Tom: the idea that British residents should pay some kind of "computer tax" as well as a "television tax" because the BBC are making their shows available online is one that may not have widespread appeal.

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Correction
Feb 14, 2006 8:19AM PST

My mistake, I mistook a requirement to undertake public service broadcasting as part of its license and recent heavy discussion about future funding to mean that it received funding via the licence fee already.

The clear issue is more around how content is to be made available profitably regardless of geographical limitation, more of an issue as we move to a cloud infrastructure that is worldwide in nature, rather than what we have now where transmission limitations of terrestial, cable or satellite systems create a natural wall to content distribution.