But it's on the iPlayer and works perfectly? So you can watch it in your own country https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dkb144
https://archive.org/details/india.-the.-modi.-question.-s-01...
It would be the first thing I'd get in a country with restricted internet :)
I suggest trying out wireguard, it's a ton easier to set up than openvpn or ipsec
I haven't been blocked on decently reputed hosting providers
And I wonder if that BBC link works in India. Or if this one does: https://btdig.com/search?q=modi+question&order=2
BCC iPlayer doesn't work in any country other than the UK, so there isn't any question of it working in India. BTDigg is blocked in India, along with most piracy oriented websites, since long before the BBC documentary thing I think.
They presumably treat everything on the service exactly the same, because it would cost them money to do otherwise, and also because they probably don't want to pay for the bandwidth for foreign users. I suspect you probably have to have a UK TV license to watch it, too, which means they're charging for it in the UK. It'd actually be surprising if they had a way to treat different content differently, as opposed to the whole service being all or nothing.
They probably also have foreign stuff on there that they've bought only the UK rights for.
Many of the best shows are co-produced with other broadcasters from countries, which means the BBC doesn't have the global rights for them. Also a decent proportion of BBC content is independently produced, which also means the BBC doesn't have the rights to that content. Lastly, the contracts for performing rights were often written before the concept of streaming, so you may have to go back to each credited performer and get the rights to distribute the show online. This has impacted DVD releases before, in one instance the BBC had to actually wait for someone to die before they could release a DVD box set, because one actor in just one episode refused to sign an updated agreement. So the list of content that's actually available is much smaller than you might think.
Maintaining a paid archive of "long tail" content has long been said to be the way forward. You can monetise that huge library of content from your past, right? Actually, it turns out that people don't actually watch that long tail. Outside the top, recent content, you'll get maybe a handful of people watching the archive each week. The cost of maintaining that archive online is non-zero and because the content is largely "cold", in terms of streaming, delivery of the archive costs you more than the popular content people are actually watching. And if you hadn't noticed, streaming services aren't renowned for being profitable in the first place.
Oh, and playback performance for cold assets is worse than fresh content. So watching an old episode of 'Only Fools and Horses' in Indonesia will have relatively poor streaming performance without putting in significant global investment. That investment being difficult to justify.
It's cheaper to syndicate the popular shows (old and new) to the other streaming services and see what gets watched.
Credentials: >20 years in broadcast/media technology, now working in a senior role at a major streaming service.
The BBC might correctly determine that, although it's a respected content producer, it doesn't have enough of that kind of power to make it work... except in the UK, where it already has a captive audience of "subscribers".
That applies at least until there is a universally adopted micropayment system, and maybe after that, too.
On edit, as a by-the-way: While it's true that everybody with a library is trying to do that, that only proves that it's trendy. Where are the numbers that say it's actually profitable?
As soon as a paid service goes subscription-only I drop it generally unless I really really need it.
I know not everyone is as anti-subscription as I am, but really, 100? Anything that pays "automatically" and auto-renews is something I have less control and visibility over so I'll do anything to avoid it.
If every impactful documentary would be given away for free, there's no incentive for anyone to pay the company behind it to make more. Journalism is expensive and I don't think enough people would donate to a large corporation through Patreon.
I would love documentaries like these to be available without restriction, but when it comes to copyright and business model, it really does come close to Moanna or Eastenders.