Board Thread:The Panopticon/@comment-1317169-20130203002409/@comment-188432-20130211221756

Home media, definitely. From a legal standpoint, that's what it is. You don't own the iPlayer download. You have the same rights to it as if you actually bought it on iTunes. Which is to say that you have it for private, non-commercial viewing (i.e. "home viewing").

On-demand viewing still doesn't generally pre-date (maybe pre-empt is a better word) the actual broadcast of something. I'm pretty sure there's never been an episode of DW which has been (legally) available on iPlayer prior to the time of its broadcast on BBC One. The only time in DWU broadcast history that something like that happened was with The New World, when Starz — by accident or design — released it to their website prior to its actual broadcast.

Remember, for simplicity's sake, we need to be concentrated upon the country of global premiere only. So ABC's iView is largely irrelevant, and entirely irrelevant to ratings. Ratings are given only for country of origin. I can see giving split ratings for those parts of the DWU that were under a co-production agreement. So, ABC ratings for The Five Doctors are totally important. But there's never been an ABC co-production in the modern era; there's only been Net10 for K9.