Or else

In a world where more of us are watching programmes online, either streamed or on demand, the BBC is super-pleased with the iPlayer, but very worried that little boxes hanging off your telly, or subscriptions to Amazon Prime and Netflix, might distract viewers from its most excellent content.

Auntie spent much of the last part of the last century demanding prime position on Electronic Programme Guides offered to Sky and Virgin subscribers. Now it's concerned that, if your little box or dongle offers you a route to BBC content, it needs to be prominent and branded on the box or dongle's landing page. 

So it has started a consultation, which leads you to a Distribution Strategy Document of 15 pages, but one message....

"The BBC considers that, in the light of its duties under the Charter and Agreement, and to showcase British content, BBC content and services should be prominently positioned within platforms’ user interfaces so as to be easily found by licence fee payers. Unlike linear channels within an EPG, neither the prominence of on-demand content and services nor the prominence of the linear EPG are currently regulated, and so the BBC engages in bilateral negotiations with platforms to agree a fair and appropriate positioning. The BBC seeks to achieve prominence in line with what audiences expect12, and in ways that are consistent with the discovery mechanisms a platform seeks to deploy. Where a third party platform will not offer fair and appropriate prominence so that it no longer meets the BBC’s conditions of distribution, the BBC may accordingly no longer support BBC iPlayer or withdraw it from that platform."