Hi Folks,
Its your old pal Jared again. Today I was going through the recent visitors list on the admin side of the blog here to see which countries read my blog the most. I was surprised to see these folks had come to pay my blog a visit. Not sure how they ended up here. Maybe my recent postings on the battle front against Zattoo and themselves? But then again the BBC is no stranger to the IAPS site, so why not show up here as well? The BBC started showing up on the IAPS site back in early 2008 and have continued since.
Much of the talk recently amongst service providers such as IAPS, our industry colleagues and associates, as well as expat circles have focused recently on the E.U. Audio Visual Directive and how online internet television should be opening up more. But based on the recent BBC litigation against Zattoo and the way over-zealous actions by tvcatchup.com, these frontiers seem to be closing down rather than opening up.
I knew right from the get-go in 2008 that the BBC was going to fight this directive hand, tooth, and nail all the way to its final conclusion and still persist on blocking any notion of opening its services to those that reside throughout the E.U. But the most aggressive player so far, who is not a broadcaster, not a media content producer, and who only owns a private unaffiliated site, tvcatchup.com, who recently promoted themselves as preparing to open their doors to the entire E.U. has aggressively blocked more viewers than any other site combined. Now does this sound like someone preparing to welcome the E.U. with open arms?
There has been mass speculation that when TVC does open its doors to the E.U. that it will be done so under a fee-based subscription service only. This makes sense, as it does cost quite a bit of money to stream channels on the internet. But TVC has not been exactly forthcoming at all in their endeavors. Their forum has removed all postings relating to opening their forum to the E.U. (And most of us remember the recent vpn attempt by themselves). The complete shut out of all information regarding the attempted vpn takeover by the mysterious affiliated TVC company by TVC Administrators casts a serious doubt about the integrity of the folks running TVC. It is my firm belief still that all vpn’s from other providers were blocked in that attempt by TVC to corner the market. After that attempt failed, they kept the block in effect so that it did not look like a blatant attempt by themselves to corner the market. I do not believe they expected to be called on it so quickly and scrambled as fast as they could to dis-associate themselves with that. All further attempts to gain any kind of clarification on this topic from the TVC forum resulted in immediate bans and a complete blackout of any information on it irregardless of who it came from. Does that sound like an entity you can trust now and in the future?
Now there are ways to beat the filters imposed by TVC but its hardly worth it. It would involve a little technical knowledge and a few other things, but it can be done. I’m not going to go into details here but TVC is not as smart as it purports itself to be.
