BBC Considers Linking Online iPlayer TV Accounts to UK Home Addresses
The endlessly vexed question of TV licence fee evasion has come up in the press again after it was today reported that the BBC were considering a change to the iPlayer video streaming service. The change would essentially involve linking people’s online BBC accounts to their home addresses for the first time (i.e. to see if anybody is using the service without a licence).
At present the iPlayer service uses somewhat of a soft approach to licence fee verification, which involves a basic check-box exercise (i.e. merely asking if you’ve got a TV licence or not) and passive checks via the use of UK-registered IP addresses (geo-checking), user-provided postcodes, and account data. But it doesn’t really do much to enforce this, and hasn’t previously linked online accounts to full UK home addresses.
According to Sky News, the BBC are now working on ways to use iPlayer to find households that haven’t paid for a TV licence, such as by linking BBC online accounts to home addresses. A TV Licensing spokesperson said: “We always look at ways to improve how we collect the licence fee. This includes using the data available to us to get a better understanding of viewing habits and use of BBC services.”
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The issue has never stopped being a hot topic, although it’s currently much more relevant as the government continue to debate the future of the BBC’s funding and more people turn to other streaming platforms. Not to mention the issue of how TV services will be delivered in the future.
The UK Government have already committed to the future of Digital Terrestrial TV (DTT) until 2034, which is in keeping with how some broadcasters have warned that existing DTT infrastructure is “unlikely to be commercially attractive after the mid-2030s“ (here); this is because they can’t afford to distribute their content both online and via traditional infrastructures like DTT with costs rising (i.e. the less time people spend on DTT, the less cost-effective per viewer it is).
In the future we may all end up getting our TV and video content via broadband connections, which has its pros and cons (here and here).
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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What’s stopping me from just putting in…any address? ♂️
“Sorry – Our Geolocation Provider says that you are 50 miles away from your home address so we cannot allow you to watch IPlayer…”
But I’m at home… ¬_¬
I will be cancelling TV License next week. Just had enough with BBC greedy pure.
They’re absolutely convinced large numbers of people are watching the BBC without a licence. Delusional.
The article is a bit unclear though. Will they ask users for an address and then later run cross checks against the TV licence database or will they check the address has a licence before anything can be played?
I would be quite concerned about the former unless they are using proper KYC to verify the identity of the account holder. It could get someone into trouble when false names and addresses are inevitably used!
Currently, there are no details on how it will actually work, so we only have the general proposal.
Just abolish it. The BBC is just getting desperate at this point with the declining purchases of licenses and people moving to digital streaming platforms. It amazes me how they’re allowed to use all these scare tactics to begin with.