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  • "I think their minds were already on the plane home. I am just not sure they were here to play today."
    Jamie Siddons on Bangladesh's performance in the last league match of the Asia Cup

    Jul 4, 2008

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    Petition to enable ex-pats access to BBC overseas

    By Will last year, mid-April Leave a comment on this post

    Crafty Leak writes:

    It is SHOCKING that the BBC (and I guess ABC in Australia) do not allow an “international” tournament (with half empty cricket grounds!) to be broadcast on-line “outside the UK”! Do they want to help cricket grow as a sport or not?

    So what if you are a UK TV license fee payer who lives abroad? You pay for the BBC, then they deny you rights to their services because you are outside the UK - IT’S DAYLIGHT ROBBERY!

    There is a campaign on the 10 Downing Street website to allow non-UK users access to BBC services:

    http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/BBC-4-Expats/

    Check it out and SIGN it! All it involves is entering your passport number - simple really, as the technology is there!

    Worth signing. I have friends overseas who are continually frustrated by the lack of access to TMS while still holding their UK passport. I don’t doubt it’s technically possible, but there is no doubt a whole mile-long length of red tape to go through first. So…sign up.

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    4 Responses to “Petition to enable ex-pats access to BBC overseas”

  • Caro wrote:
    April 16th, 2007 at 4.30 am

    I see you bypassed reporting/commenting on the great Ireland/Bangladesh match altogether. Will. Too busy with Prince Willie’s break-up?

  • Elliott wrote:
    April 16th, 2007 at 6.08 am

    Um… Is it may be jst me, but i managed to lsiten to TMS for a whole night a few weeks ago, and im in Australia. I was stuck at a mates place with no pay-tv and australia were playing, so i just thought i would try my luck with TMS adn i got on and it was going all night (I fell asleep for most of the game hahahah). Anyway i thought it was weird that i could get on.

    Any thoughts?

  • Scott wrote:
    April 16th, 2007 at 6.51 am

    I thought it was Will’s turn and he thought it was Mike’s turn and Mike thought it was my turn, so it was a general cockup all round. Sorry about that folks.

  • Neil wrote:
    April 16th, 2007 at 11.47 am

    This response to a similar question about Ashes commentary was given by Roger Mosey (director of Sport at the BBC):

    “I keep saying on this blog “let me have one more bash at the overseas rights issue”, so I’ll have another go [...]

    Worldwide rights are almost never available. Sports rights are sold country-by-country, and you can see that if you allowed the BBC to stream cricket commentaries globally then it would be a direct competitor for the company who’d bought the internet rights in Australia or anywhere else.

    Very occasionally - and it’s happened in the past with cricket or now with the Six Nations rugby - we are able to secure global rights; but that will be the exception rather than the rule.

    [...] we have to prioritise in favour of UK licence-payers anyway. Unfortunately it’s not possible to serve only Brits abroad: we’d have to pay a fortune to secure rights for mass populations in each individual territory and you can’t justify that to licence payers in Bradford or Brighton.

    But also don’t ignore BBC World Service radio - which broadcasts a lot of sport [...] Then we have this website available globally, which means there is at least more access to news and information about UK sport - even if unfortunately that can’t normally include live commentary or highlights of the action.”

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