[SunburntRock89]

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

recombu.com 


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.

It's still reasonably trivial to download stuff from iPlayer (using the aptly named get_iplayer). The max you can get is 720p though.

I really like iPlayer as a platform but find it hard to deal with the 720p maximum on pretty much all devices.
You can stream 4K content on about 4 devices and the BBC decides exactly which devices are allowed.

I bought a Fire Stick 4k expecting to be able to view stuff in 4k, turns out they had some sort of an issue with it which they blaimed Amazon for about 3 years ago. You still can't watch in 4k all these years later. The issue they described was super minor too.

Did some resarch with a friend and it appears they have specific certificates installed on every 4k compatible device to protect the streaming endpoints.