Some facts to inform the debate.

Licence payers do not own the content the BBC broadcasts.

As has already been pointed out, the use of DRM to give content a shelf-life once downloaded is dictated by the rights owners, not by the BBC itself. Besides, if you can't sidestep it, you're not trying hard enough.

The geographic restriction to users within the UK is similarly dictated by the rights owners, not by the BBC itself.

Despite what you may have read, with a little ingenuity, iPlayer can easily be made to work on a Vista PC.

With some more ingenuity, the Kontiki client behind the iPlayer re-badging can be easily reigned in and prevented from playing fast 'n' loose with bandwidth.

iPlayer runs fine within Firefox. Get the IE Tab Add-in from the relevant Mozilla page and all is well.

For iPlayer there are significant additional costs beyond the existing costs of content production:

The content must be transcoded specifically for iPlayer use; someone has to provide the kit and run the transcoding process. This costs money.

Once transcoded, the content has to be stored and served from an array of internet connected machines; someone has to provide the kit and run the servers. This also costs money.

Due to pressure from the Open Source movement and from disgruntled Licence payers, the BBC has decided to halt production of the current iPlayer design. Instead, a further 40 million of Licence payer's pounds will be spent re-engineering the design for Linux users. Another 5 million will be spent on a support network for (ordinary man-in-the-street non-geek) end-users who have difficulty setting up their Linux PCs. The resultant design will deliver only content for which there are no rights owners. Can't wait.

I made one of these up.