It's frustrating, but it's also inevitable from such a hostile environment.
The real problem is that the BBC must be in a position whereby, should the government decide to link TV license and BBC access in a hard way, or (god forbid) fully privatise the service, they can flip a switch and make it so. So everything has to be behind a registration wall.
They have been under 13 years of pressure from Tory governments, run by friends of Murdoch, who don't believe in free knowledge and public broadcasting; the BBC had to be seen to go in the general direction of preparing for de-facto privatisation. This is the result.
I think they missed a trick by not getting into the open HDMI dongle market, letting companies like Amazon take the initiative. We now see the result of those non-open platforms (amazon taking 30% of income as a platform provider etc), but with government interference as it is (remember it was Labour that stopped the BBC building an international streaming service back in 2009) I can see why.
A New Labour government run by friends of Murdoch. You can guess the constant there.
