English TV Abroad

Hello

I recently spent some time in Holland and I saw that the BBC transmitted there. It was the BBC London feed. I was wondering how that was possible?

BBC One and Two (and more recently Three, Four, CBBC and CBeebies) have been available on cable TV in the Benelux countries for many years (certainly as far back as the 80s - possibly even earlier). Originally they were received off-air by large aerial arrays on the coast (in a similar way to the method used by the Channel Islands).

More recently they are received by simply downlinking the Astra 2 broadcasts used by Freesat and Sky receivers in the UK. I believe they are also available on Swiss cable platforms.

The cable operators pay the BBC a fee to re-broadcast, and the standard BBC rights agreements for archive, stills etc. include a small footnote about UK and Ireland rights also including these outlets. Similarly, at one point, freelance contracts for certain types of employee also included a "cable supplement" to recognise that their work would be viewed outside the UK and Ireland to a small degree.

I never knew that, thanks for letting me know. I'd assumed that the BBC in the UK could only broadcast within the country.

I saw that BBC 1 and 2 were viewable. BBC 3 and 4 were on the epg but not watchable.

For some time it was only the cable operators who had this longstanding agreement to carry the BBC channels, so that new platforms such as DTT and IPTV were at a disadvantage, because they were unable to offer BBC1 and BBC2 which Dutch viewers were so used to seeing. Around 2011 the operators of these platforms were able to arrange deals with BBC Worldwide as well, so that BBC One and BBC Two are now part of the basic packages on all major platforms in the Netherlands, and Three/Four are often available too as part of a premium package.

http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2011/01/27/kpn-tv-get-domestic-bbc-channels/

There is a bbc2 England on 23.5e in Powervu presumably it's downloaded here?

EDIT: It has been deleted.

The BBC and other British channels are also available in Ireland and parts of northern France (at least over the air in the latter case; I'm not sure about cable systems).

It's always been like that. Here's an excerpt from John Ardagh's 1968 book The New French Revolution :

"And even ITV and BBC in the Channel Islands attract a small audience in the Contentin, around St. Malo, and as far inland as Rennes. The local paper, Ouest-France, publishes the British programmes; in Dinard there is a Cercle des Amis de Channel (Channel TV) and a holiday hotel in Cartelet altered its dinner-hour so that its British summer guests could watch Coronation Street! [...] There is even some French advertising on Channel TV, though the ITA does not regard this as strictly legal."

By the way, cross-border TV watching has always been relatively widespread in Continental Europe. Here's another quote from a book, this time Timothy Green's 1971 volume The Universal Eye: World Television in the Seventies :

"The ordinary family in Brussels can, with a good aerial and a modified television set, view no less than eleven channels in five countries. Besides Belgium's own two channels -- one broadcasting in French, the other in Flemish -- Belgians have a choice of two channels from ORTF in France (three from 1972 onwards), three from Germany, two from the Netherlands and one from Luxembourg."

And here's Ardagh again about the situation in France in the late '60s:

"Tele-Luxembourg [...] has a viewership of one million in Lorraine, at least three times as many as in Luxembourg iteslf: in Nancy, 98 per cent of sets are adapted to receive it. In Provence, Tele Monte Carlo [...] has been making a huge offensive and also claims a viewership of a million or more, from Menton to Marseille. Both these TV companies put their emphasis on variety, quiz-games, and popular films; there is virtually no culture, and within their reception zones they attract more viewers than the two ORTF networks together, especially among the working class. In German-speaking Alsace, 90 percent of sets are adapted to one or other German Rundfunk.[...]"

Slightly off topic, but hardly worth creating a new thread over or searching for a more appropriate one. Do do broadcasters in the UK pay more for being on the Sky EPG in ROI as well as the UK or would it all be included in the same price?

If they do pay more, do the BBC pay extra and how is this justified? Also do broadcasters that are just on the EPG in Ireland such as TV3 and RTE pay the same rates as they would for a Britain and Ireland wide place, I'd assume not.

Not every thing has been legal....

In the Autumn of 1977, a commercial Dutch Television company was recording Anglia television signals and transmitting its English programmes, including Coronation street and Survival, to its viewers in Amsterdam. The Dutch government did not believe it was a violation of Dutch copyright law - EBU legal advisers held discussions about to how resolve the matter.

Was it a pirate company? The Netherlands didn't have (legally licensed) commercial television at the time.

Let me dig out the newspaper clipping about that, Get back to you about that.

There are a couple of BFBS broadcasts of BBC services around I think - using Powervu.

There is also the BBC DVB-T distribution backup service on Intelsat 907 : http://en.kingofsat.net/tp.php?tp=1524 This backs up the BBC's two PSB DVB-T/T2 muxes (and thus includes ITV/C4 HD services which the BBC carries on DVB-T2) in case of loss of fibre distribution.

I don't think either of these methods are used for cable operators on the continent - I think they will be downlinking the FTA Astra 2 stuff. (The BBC did this for a while for analogue TV on the Channel Islands - and possibly a few analogue transmitters in the UK just before DSO)