h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I never understood the 'freebie thing' thinking - the BBC certainly gets a lot of its incomes from other countries and other things than the license fee. STV (the Swedish equivalence of the BBC) often shows BBC documentaries, and some BBC TV series as well.

But STV will be paying for the documentaries, no one outside UK licence fee area is paying for BBC to provide worldwide accessible content. If one accepts the BBC are being paid to provide a service by UK licence fees why should it be free worldwide?

I wouldn't have thought it was simple to deny access to content beyond UK users, but maybe that reflects my ignorance of what is possible.

The BBC streams all its national radio stations and a lot of its local stations. In other words, I can listen to the BBC 24/7 if I keep my PC on 24/7, and I can do that for free as an ex-pat living abroad.

Audio streams are relatively lean in terms of required bandwidth which is why you can also (until yesterday, apparently) also listen to audio news reports from the BBC news website, and watch video files in appallingly low quality.

If you're in the UK you can watch broadband files for free because - theoretically - you pay the licence fee, and if you're overseas you can also watch some broadband content by paying a monthly fee. But here's the catch - you have to go through RealPlayer and pay the money to them I won't have anything to do with that bunch of ers

I can well understand how a cash-strapped public organisation might be reticent about allowing free access to broadband content because servers and bandwidth cost money, but - and here's the irrational part - as a former licence payer who coughed up my wedge every year that I owned my own TV, and as a Brit and a cricket-lover, I don't see why the I shouldn't be able to listen to Test Match Special or watch good quality video files from what I still consider to be one of the best media organisations in the world. If it's a matter of rights, I can't honestly think what the problem might be because no-one else is webcasting the Ashes in America, and it's an audio stream, not expensive broadband video, that we're talking about here.

The BBC need to ditch whatever arrangement they have with RealPlayer because anyone who knows anything about software and streaming knows that Real is one of the most despised companies and programs and often features in 'Worst Ten Pieces of Software' lists, both for its uselessness and because of the company's reputation for not being too careful with the email addresses it gleans from anyone naive enough to let them have it.