In message , at 
19:11:55 on Tue, 22 Sep 2009, Mark Goodge 
 remarked:
>>Latest piece of making-it-up-as-we-go-along thinking has come from Eric
>>Huggers, the BBC's technology boss. He's actually called for the TV
>>licence regs to be monkeyed about with yet again. I have a verbatim
>>minute on his comments to the Broadcast Press Guild about the iPlayer
>>menace: "My view is that if you are using the iPlayer you have to be a
>>television licence fee payer. I don't believe in a free ride. If you are
>>consuming BBC services then you have to be a licence holder."
>
>From a purely logical perspective, he has a point. Other broadcasters'
>catch-up services are funded by the same mechanism as their broadcasts
>- you can only watch stuff on SkyPlayer, for example, that's part of
>your standard Sky sub, and 4oD is advertising funded. So it makes
>sense to apply the same principle to the BBC, at least as far as that
>goes. Where he's getting it wrong is in assuming that this necessarily
>means extending the licence fee to iPlayer users.

Another assumption is that the restrictions on overseas availability are 
to do with paying the licence fee (or indeed problems with 
locally-negotiated copyright). Just as serious are the issues about "who 
pays for the somewhat large amount of international bandwidth".
-- 
Roland Perry