This is big money, up-front, with no need to build out a global delivery system or deal with millions of customers.
This is one of those classic examples of something that looks really simple from an outsiders perspective but once you have to deal with the details you realise it's anything but simple. And through no fault of the BBC either, I might add. Various commercial stations and news outlets have campaigned relentlessly to shut the Beeb down. It's a miracle the service is still operating, even if their hands are tightly tied.
Hell, I thought the practice would die (or at least slow down) when Netflix started transitioning away from syndicated TV and movies; this never happened. Netflix will totally geoblock their own shows so they can, say, release a cartoon on a weekly basis in Japan but in binge-watchable chunks in America.
You will continue to see anything more premium than a high-subscriber-count YouTube channel be geoblocked until and unless one of two things happens:
- Geoblocking gets so heinous that it starts to push people away from shows and services, beyond ordinary subscriber churn. This is unlikely - the US is the biggest market for a lot of this stuff, and that's a market full of people who have no desire to watch foreign media ahead of an official release. Hell, most of us don't even have passports, and think that you can just move to another country by asking politely.
- Some country or trading bloc gets enough of a bug up their butt about getting releases late that they start amending copyright law to ban the practice. AFAIK, I've heard Australia was considering banning region locked DVD players at one point; and that the EU was considering forcing online video providers to license content on an EU-wide basis.
The BBC is complete license owner of virtually zero programming. Almost all (as in 99.9%+) of their content uses substantial third party copyright works where the cost implications of selling internationally still apply (just the music rights alone will drive you mad, and it's far from uncommon for BBC content that is shown in the UK to have a different soundtrack to the internationally sold version to the likes of Netflix due to the licensing cost and complexity).
It is also worth noting that the BBC makes a lot less than people think, especially if you consider BBC studios to be a quasi-separate production entity now (which it is!).
