60m Overseas Viewers Enjoy BBC for Free as Moffat Defends Corporation

Christian Cawley is a writer at Kasterborous Doctor Who News and Reviews - All the latest Doctor Who news and reviews with our weekly podKast, features and interviews, and a long-running forum.

The Conservative government’s green paper investigating the current structure and performance of the BBC will propose changes that will more than likely be imposed. As a result, many supporters of the BBC have spoken out in support of the organization, despite having no genuine idea what proposals will be made.

Among them is Steven Moffat, who has spoken recently to The Stage. As well as being one of the many industry people to put their names to an open letter backing the corporation, Moffat has made an impassioned support of the BBC.

“If we limit it, or damage it, or destroy it, we have absolutely no idea how to turn [the BBC] back on, because we don’t know how it happened it the first place… You could look at [the BBC’s] philosophy, you could look at the fact that somehow from the work of those early pioneers it became a beacon of quality – not just for Britain, but for the entire world.”

He goes on, pointing the finger at the goverment:

“If we allow, basically, the Tories to turn off the people that are criticising them, which is what is happening, I can’t see how we’d get it back.”

(It might be argued, of course, that the BBC has already had its critical teeth pulled; there are many who feel that ever since the September Dossier affair in the run up to the Iraq invasion, the BBC has generally failed to hold governments since to account.)

Many have criticised those backing the BBC for doing so out of loyality to their employers. But is it really a “pathetic argument”?

“The inevitable, pathetic argument against this is that we’re all feathering our own nests because we’re all employed by the BBC – but they don’t pay that well.”

Despite Moffat rightly claiming that “I could have made more money if I’d stayed with my Spielberg three-picture deal, and not done Doctor Who,” the fact remains that any financial interest is going to result in loyalty that might blind someone to the weaknesses of their employer. It’s probably reasonable to dismiss both sides of this argument, but I suspect we’ll be hearing various twists on it until the green paper is published (and beyond)…

But here’s the flip side. Should British license fee payers be supporting a broadcaster whose BBC iPlayer service is being enjoyed absolutely free by an estimated 60 million people worldwide who are using VPN technology to hide their online location (and we’re not talking about Netflix and Hulu viewers here)? Figures suggest half of this figure is from China alone, but that still leaves 30 million people enjoying Top Gear, Sherlock, Doctor Who, EastEnders and more without contributing a single penny to their production.

Bearing in mind that the last UK census recorded a population of 63 million, is it perhaps time that the BBC changed its payment model to ensure that it is gathering income from these overseas viewers as well as those at home? Only 25,460,801 colour TV licenses were recorded in 2014 (with a further 4.7 million licenses for the elderly). Again, the degree to which unauthorised, overseas viewers are taking advantage of the BBC’s output is staggering.

A BBC spokesman said:

“BBC iPlayer, and the content on it, is paid for by UK licence fee payers to watch and download in the UK and the terms of use reflect that.

“We do not comment on individual cases regarding breaches of BBC iPlayer’s terms of use, but we take steps where appropriate to protect the intellectual property belonging to rights holders.”

Could it be time for BBC iPlayer to head online as a premium multiplatform app, like Netflix and Hulu? And could the resulting income result in a lower license fee, or an increased quality of production on our favourite TV shows? Should the British public be forced to pay for what is now, essentially to all intents and purposes, a global on-demand TV network?

What do you think?

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