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Comment by johansch | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's a Commonwealth thing? :)

<humor>There's plenty of opportunities for former members (e.g. USA) to re-apply to join in the post-Brexit world. One of the many benefits could be access to the BBC iPlayer !</humor>

We will be happy to accept application for statehood from England. I expect Scotland to rejoin the EU.

󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿?

Scotland saying F-U to the UK and joining the EU would be so neat!

OT: I wonder why there’s a skull/question mark overlapping where the reply button should be? Something something Unicode, but for static text like “reply”? iOS 11 on an iPhone 6.

EDIT: page refresh and the reply button shows up, still with the unrendendered Unicode bit.

It's a sequence of Unicode characters that's supposed to render as the Welsh flag. The first character U+1F3F4 BLACK FLAG seems to be missing (at least when I copy and paste it); that's followed by "tag letters" from the U+E0061-U+E007A spelling "gbwls". See https://unicode.org/reports/tr51/#valid-emoji-tag-sequences

I think the BLACK FLAG is getting removed by HN's emoji filtering, but the modifier characters after it are remaining.

Thanks for the explanation. On my phone, so tools for diagnosis are lacking, but it sounds like you might know your Unicode better than I do anyway. :-)

I’m sure this has been said before, but iPlayer is a bit of an abomination, but the content is excellent. The BBC have this weird thing where content expires, which is annoying. I rate that up there with my local library that lets you ‘borrow’ books digitally, but they ‘expire’ after a couple of weeks. If you forget to ‘return’ them you get a notice and a reminder to destroy them. How did this happen?

Having experienced various streaming services in the US, I find iPlayer to be anything but an abomination. Don't think I've ever experienced lag with it, and the ability to watch live shows is really very impressive.

I’ve never watched anything live, but the combined action of adverts and interface gets me.

It doesn’t seem to remember where I left off, they stick to the weekly schedule, they ‘expire’ content and the navigation is nowhere near the Netflix standard. It is a load better than my local offering (Lightbox) which is not good. Audio sync being my current pain point.

Adverts? For iPlayer?

I am genuinely glad that my TV licence is being put to good use (in the UK, public broadcast TV is paid for: we pay a licence fee to own a TV, currently £147) There are around 60M people here in ~27M households(do the maths)

The BBC (Beeb, Auntie) is an anachronism in the modern world but it works. For example Blue Planet II is an example of cutting edge journalism that I don't think could have happened if Netflix, Amazon were the only game in town.

Blue Planet II is great, but is it really journalism?

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