[SunburntRock89]

I was slightly irritated that the BBC removed the “England” option in the regions drop-down well before launching the HD regions on iPlayer. I’d previously used that to stream BBC One HD (red screen version, of course) but lost the chance to do that around Christmas.

Not sure what device you are using iPlayer on, but when I access it through browser, the ability to choose England and get regionless HD stream is alive and well.

It seems to be on certain devices.  BBC London on the PC is only 720p when watched in full screen, but 1080p/50fps when using the Amazon Fire TV Cube.

I think everything on the PC is 720p or less, be that BBC London or newest Attenborough documentary. Not sure what it has to do with - is it the digital rights problem, the fear of pirating? But it is still 720p in DRM-friendly Edge. Fear for the servers to go down if everybody watching on a PC does that in 1080p50 instead of 720p50?

It's almost certainly done for DRM reasons. Last I checked, 4K and 1080p content was protected with sets of SSL certificates that were baked into supported devices. Since then, the BBC have been super selective on which devices can and cannot have high quality content.

PCs are super duper easy to defeat DRM on, even when done well, but at the same time, it's the same on streaming sticks, so I don't know who they're trying to fool.

Hell, you can download stuff straight off iPlayer with certain tools into MP4s.

I did find recently that there's a 4K test stream airing a loop of the end of the 1st half of the FA Cup Final 2019 (I think that's what it was, but I might be misremembering, nevertheless it does exist), but I've not had the chance to test any of the other links I've found to see if it's just this test stream that's unprotected.

They've clearly got the chains for it considering they do broadcast some stuff in UHD.