Is it okay, or isn't it?

You know when you get that sudden sinking feeling because you realise that you may have inadvertently done something wrong? Something triggers the putting of things together in your head and you have a moment of panic where the world wobbles a bit?

It happened to me today.

There I was, listening to the idle banter at work, and the subject of Top Gear came up, and I thought about watching the episode in question in iPlayer, the Beeb's phenomenally successful 'catch-up TV' player. Which is when the guilt suddenly overwhelmed me - it suddenly occurred to me that I had watched programmes on iPlayer at work, without a TV licence! I have a TV licence at home, but not at work...

Time moves slowly under these circumstances. The web browser crawled, snail-like, to the FAQs and an intriguing link to the TV licencing web-site, where it seemed to indicate that watching 'live' TV required a licence. The link away from the FAQs intrigued me, so I went back to the iPlayer web-site and dug around a bit more...

Which is when things got really interesting.

The iPlayer web-site and other places make it very clear that you can't watch a tv programme using iPlayer if it is being broadcast at the same time - a 'simulcast' - without a TV licence. But if the programme isn't being shown at the same time - 'live' - then you don't need a TV licence. All of which seemed clear enough, until I thought about what a 'simulcast' means...

Top Gear is one of the BBC's most widely sold programmes. Many countries show it, and so there is a finite probability that when you watch it on iPlayer, it is also being shown in one of these countries. Multiply that small but finite probability with the large number of people using iPlayer, and you end up with the realisation that for some of these people, they are watching Top Gear at the same time as it is being broadcast, somewhere in the world. Now with lots of countries showing it, and no easy way of finding out if is is being shown at the time that you want to watch it on iPlayer, this means that you have no way of knowing if it is being broadcast at the same time, and so you don't know if you need a TV licence in order to watch it. Alternatively, then you have to limit what you mean by a 'simulcast' to a limited geographical area, which it currently isn't...

So as far as I can see, there's no way of knowing for certain if you need, or don't need, a TV licence in order to watch a programme on iPlayer. So you can't know definitively if you are actually breaking the law, but you can work out, reasonably accurately, what the odds are that you are. Deliciously ironic, particularly since the more popular a programme is, the greater the chance of unknowingly breaking the law. I'm expecting the TV licencing people to start sending out demands any moment now...