[cable]

Agree - I’m subbed to All4+ at the moment as I’d been away for 2 weeks and there was a fair amount I wanted to catchup up there. Plus a few comedies I missed earlier this year, so it just makes it nicer to stream stuff without the ads.

I believe for both All4+ and ITV Hub+, any shows “with ads” are purely for licencing reasons - so it’s usually imports but the ad is never more than 1 “channel promo”.

Isn’t it something to do with the US broadcasters not wanting to give the whole show away (if recorded off the service) with no interruption? It’s why Family Guy was never on iPlayer

I never quite understood that. When BBC Three moved online, Fox sold it to ITV because "iPlayer wasn't secure"

recombu.com 

Fox is understood to be concerned that iPlayer does not have enough security to stop users capturing shows so they can be kept for later viewing, or shared online

But the funny thing is... neither does ITV Hub (or did, I should say). Of course everything was in SD so that's probably a reason why they didn't care.

However ITVX will be using the same security measures that the major streamers like Prime, Disney+ and also All4 and My5 use - Widevine.

I recall it has something to do with the fact you could download BBC iPlayer programmes (www.bbc.co.uk ). Arguably, if you could strip DRM from the files, you could easily share it online in high quality. You can also still use screen video capture in Mac (command+shift+5) to record iPlayer. On ITV Hub you get a black box.

Also back then, forums.digitalspy.com  - seems there were projects that could do this relatively easily.