They did have the Global iPlayer going for a while, but it had a lot less current content, with some archive material. It also was only available on the iPad, and only available in certain markets (not the US, due to pressure from networks threatening to drop BBC America). It limped along as a public beta before being killed off half way through last year. Although apparently they're going to launch something else soon:

http://www.rethinkresearch.biz/articles/bbc-reawakens-plans-...

They say a BBC streaming subscription service is going to launch in the US this year.

Unfortunately I'm not sure the BBC have the entrepreneurial spirit to throw in their current international contracts, and try to launch themselves as a global network. I suspect they'll wait until the VoD market is much larger, which will mean that their competition will be very strong.

Until recently I could watch it using my VPN from Hong Kong, but recently they've been blocking access from VPNs.

I should set up my own VPN again, instead of using paid for services.

Edit: I can't decide if that's a good or bad thing, given I've never paid for a UK TV licence, but for official purposes I still live at my parents' house, who do pay.

You could spin up a DigitalOcean droplet in the London region around once a week and use youtube-dl to download the bits you're interested in. Cost would be like $0.10 per month. You could even make a script that sets up an OpenVPN droplet and automatically tears it down, would still be very very cheap.

I ran openvpn on digital ocean before.

But then I wanted one in the UK sometimes, and in the US sometimes.

And then I tried to watch HKTV from Taiwan, so needed one in HK.

So I ended up with ExpressVPN.

But... let's see what happens this year. Especially with netflix!

If you set it up manually each time, sure, that won't work very well. But you should be able to automate that - create the config (CA and everything) once and then just spin up a droplet via the API, install the packages, copy and unpack the config. I don't think you'd need to customize more than the sever's IP address in the config.

I built something similar with sshuttle (way easier than OpenVPN) two years ago, it's at https://github.com/lorenzhs/instavpn but it uses the old DO API and is rather hacky. sshuttle also isn't very good for streaming.

I'll have a go! Thanks for the suggestion.

You need to get a better VPN my friend - mine still works!

Its expressvpn, and I just (accidentally) paid for another year.

How much is the TV license in the UK? If it's reasonable I'd be tempted to pay it for iPlayer access. Honestly, I'd rather just torrent everything, but I do pay for Amazon, Netflix, Hulu and often cable access that I don't use (guilt is a powerful driver).

The BBC is discouraged from producing its own content, so a lot of the content is made by third parties and the BBC doesn't have the rights to broadcast them outside the UK. That's why you get BBC branded channels in different countries because those channels have to compete to buy the rights. There's lots of other things too, like music rights, sports rights etc. Means the content has to be redone.

Around $18 per month, at current exchange rates.

I'd happily pay even $25 a month for legal, good quality access to the BBC's programming.

A large chunk of that goes towards the broadcast infrastructure, so it could potentially be less for an Internet only version.