Riviera Reporter
Riviera Reporter
THE FRENCH RIVIERA'S ENGLISH LANGUAGE NEWS MAGAZINE
THE FRENCH RIVIERA'S ENGLISH LANGUAGE NEWS MAGAZINE

Satellite reception - The Reality of TV

“Watch BBC1, ITV, Channel Four and Five with our simple IPTV Box. Just plug into your router and get all these channels no dish required.”

You will not be able to buy this new IPTV box from HasEurope.com. Company Director Terry Sherlock explains why they have taken this tough decision not to sell. 
Girl watching TV on sofa, shocked

IPTV, even though their clients will lose BBC, ITV, Channel 4 & 5 comes late summer 2013.

In Spain for many years clients have needed large dishes to watch Eastenders and Coronation Street. This was the first lead to illegal microwave re-transmissions of channels,  and in some cases, done with Spanish approval for their networks. These changes in this “Wild West” TV landscapes were painful for the viewer at times.

The latest re-transmission entry over the last year or so – IPTV – is not provided by your broadband provider but by private companies wanting to stream live TV over someone else’s broadband network.

These companies claim to be legal but I have real doubts if this will prove to be the case when tested in the courts, and I have the following question, to which I cannot find answers, that would reassure me to sell and recommend this new way to watch British TV in France: These companies are streaming without the permission of the broadcaster, not just live but 7 or 14-day archived TV shows. In light of the European Courts ruling on March 7th 2013 (see box) can this really be legal?

“EU COURT OF JUSTICE: INTERNET LIVE STREAMING OF BROADCASTS IS PIRACY”

“In its judgment of 7 March 2013, the European Court of Justice decided that simultaneous relay of broadcasts via the Internet constitutes copyright infringement. This is true even where the potential audience of the Internet service is the same as that of the relayed TV broadcasting service. Under EU law, Internet retransmissions of broadcast programmes are subject to authorisation by all copyright holders with respect to those programmes.”
Source: EBU.CH

Regarding this judgement of “broadcasting by a third party over the internet of signals of commercial television broadcasters – “'Live streaming' – communication to the public”, when your broadband provider sends TV over their network it is done in such a way as not to congest the whole system. These new IPTV providers are pushing multiple streams over the World Wide Web and this will surely cripple the network at some point in the future. You have to wonder how broadband providers like Orange and SFR will react.

They could:
    1. Block access to the IP Addresses.
    2. Slow down your connection as you are using large amounts of data for streaming video over long periods everyday.
    3. Charge you extra for breaching fair use policy.
The companies providing these IPTV services are not as reputable as Sky or Astra. Will they all survive over time, and if not, what happens to your IPTV box when they go under? Is it money down the drain!

In our view by far the best option is for you to pick up the signal direct from the satellite. It will take a few months from when the new satellite starts transmitting late August/early September 2013, as they test and alter the beam, but by January 2014 the size of dish should be clear, which may be somewhere between 1.2m to 1.8m.

In the meantime services like BBC iPlayer are not blocking VPN access so you could access these catch up services. Watching or downloading the odd show will not use large amounts of data compared to full-time viewing.

It will be interesting to see where this all ends up. It’s true that Napster, the illegal music sharing website, paved the way for iTunes. Maybe we will see something similar down the road with large providers like Orange looking at English TV.

For the moment, however, at HasEurope we’re using Sky Plus HD Box and Dish, technology we trust.

See Also

Popular: Culture, Arts & History