German channels (including commercial ones) buy their content with rights across Europe. They could buy this from the rights holders for a manageable amount, since the content is only broadcast in German. So there is no English soundtrack.

The German-speaking market is so large that this is a sustainable business model.

The same goes for Turkish and French channels: there are enough Turkish and French speakers in Europe to make this interesting, but too few to guarantee that rights holders can claim first prize. Again as long as no English audio track is sent.

The BBC is a different story. They prefer to buy UK-only rights and go to great lengths to make it difficult for their channels to be watched outside the UK. In this way they hope to pay lower rates to rights holders.

For example, the BBC’s transponders (Astra 2 at 28.2°E) were set for a few years so that channels could only be received in the UK. Unencrypted, as the BBC does not want Britons to rely on a smart card decoder to watch BBC programmes.

But because these messengers do not accurately On the territory of the United Kingdom, the BBC can also be received in the Netherlands, Belgium and northern France with a sufficiently large dish. and not encrypted.

So since the BBC can be received in the Dutch language area and of course always sends an English audio track, they also bought the rights to us. With the great score, the BBC can also be watched on cable and even via NLZiet (“NLZiet Extra”) (for which providers charge a fee).

British commercial broadcasters (ITV, Channel 4 and RTL Group with Five, plus a multitude of smaller providers) do not have those rights to the Dutch-speaking area, and so are not allowed to provide their programming (at least the majority of their providers) to us. But it also hasn’t been encrypted for about 20 years, so that British people with a satbox without a decoder/smartcard can also see commercial breaks to watch programmes.

The upshot is that you can only watch those commercial channels in the Netherlands and Belgium via satellite dish, which rights holders seem to tolerate, but not via cable.

By the way, ITV did a test run in the Dutch language area: it was shown briefly about 10 years ago on a number of Dutch cable networks and Telenet, but only with ITV1 (so that programs that were too expensive could be moved to ITV2). It didn’t lead to anything, and then they tried to take over Talpa (they succeeded, but only the production company, not the channel).

In Switzerland, they took a more favorable point of view: everything available there is unencrypted from the air Can Pick it up is allowed on the cable. So are British channels (as long as you put on a huge dish, you can even receive them in Switzerland).