Lorraine Heggessey, former Controller of BBC1 sure thinks we should:

Users of the BBC iPlayer should be charged “micro payments” to use the online catch-up service said Lorraine Heggessey, chief executive of TV production company Talkback Thames.

Ms Heggessey was speaking at a BBC event on Tuesday.

Tony Cohen, chief executive of Talkback’s parent company Fremantle Media, has also spoken out in support of a revenue model for all catch up TV.

Fremantle is currently conducting a feasibility study of the concept.

Most broadcasters now offer an online catch-up service, and with advertising revenue falling in the commercial TV sector, there is increasing industry support for the idea of charging for it.

Research carried out by Fremantle suggests that people would be willing to pay up to £2 for certain shows.
However, the BBC says it has no plans to introduce such a fee.

“The cost of the BBC iPlayer is covered by the licence fee, so UK users have already paid for this service,” said a spokesperson.

It makes no sense whatsoever, until you look at the “industry support” for charging for catch-up services. Of course they want the iPlayer to join in, to legitimise their money grab. But would ITV in particular be in such dire straits with advertising if it just made half decent television and encouraged audiences to come back for a little more than the latest episode in Peter Andre or Jordan’s latest personal crisis? And then there’s the real issue of the iPlayer: when I can TIVO, Sky+, video record, DVD record or BluRay record pretty much anything broadcast, what’s with the iPlayer time limiting what I can and can’t keep? Cory Doctorow argues:

a British license-payer who records a digital video-stream from the Beeb’s broadcast towers can store the recording forever, can watch it on any computer or TV, and can otherwise enjoy all the freedoms that we’ve had since the VCR was legalized.

But with the iPlayer, you can only watch shows on authorized devices (all these devices require a license from a non-British corporation to manufacture) and only according to a baroque set of rules that delete your recordings after a set period.

The law compels British TV owners to pay for the production of these programmes — so it’s natural that they’ll want to go on enjoying the freedoms they’ve had in the pre-Internet era.

he BBC has declared war on the people who fund it. That’s not a war it can win.

I would tend to agree. But of course rights issues are involved, so the BBC feels the iPlayer needs to live in a permanent area of compromise, given how much of its output is made by production companies whose deals with the BBC tie the corporation’s hands in terms of rebroadcasts, in order to maximise the profits from DVD sales. So why would I then essentially, using Heggessey’s argument, want to pay the production company three times for the same product if I watched it on BBC1, liked the idea of a box set and missed an episode on first run and wanted to catch up on the iPlayer? Ghastly.