Thanks to geographic restrictions, the BBC makes it difficult for Americans to tune in to Jeremy Clarkson's jokes on Top Gear about how fat Americans are.

To be fair, in a response to questions sent via email, BBC iPlayer Publicist Daniel Maynard confirmed that the network does use geographic blocking software for the iPlayer site, but made it clear that “TV content on BBC iPlayer is only available within the UK, however Radio programmes are available globally,” so you can at least listen to the news. But no Top Gear, East Enders, Friday Night with Jonathan Ross, cricket tests, or upcoming Winter Olympics coverage. What’s a fat yankee with a love of fried fish, malt vinegar and charming vernacular to do?

Turns out it is possible to access the iPlayer in the commonwealth and beyond — basically by pretending to be British. Or at least, pretending to have an IP address located in the British Isles. And after the standing ovation of acclaim I was rewarded with after pointing out how to use the free, online virtual private network service from Hotspot Shield to access Hulu from outside the United States, a loophole which was quickly closed, I figured I’d better hedge my bets and offer a choice of options.

Proxies: Using a Firefox browser add-on like FoxyProxy and lists of free, anonymous proxy servers in the UK, you can successfully pretend to be at a computer in England downing alcopops and pining for the Jedwards. However, proxy servers come and go, the latency means browsing the site for shows can be frustrating, and streaming video and server-side caching aren’t the best of friends. Additionally, the iPlayer uses the Flash plugin to stream video, and the plugin can snoop your actual IP address and block you (to its credit, the iPlayer doesn’t seem to bother doing this).

Tor: You can also use the Tor network to obfuscate your identity and location. Blogger Cherie Hurwitz has a handy guide that uses Tor and FoxyProxy to access the iPlayer through a relay based in the UK. The list of Tor relays seem to be much more stable and reliable than free, anonymous proxy servers. However, by default the Flash plugin is disabled because of the possibility of IP sniffing mentioned above. Even if you’re running a browser through virtual machine applications like VMWare, your real IP might be found and video blocked.

VPN: Interestingly, a number of VPN services are actively advertising themselves as methods for circumventing geographic restrictions to allow access to sites like Hulu or the iPlayer, so there is clearly some demand. In my tests using the free trial from UK Proxy Server (which naturally also offers proxy server connections), it was the easiest, fastest way to access the iPlayer from San Francisco, with no software to download.

But most VPN services charge a fee for continued use, usually a few dollars (or pounds, or euros) a month. And though I haven’t been able to test it, the iPhone supports VPN connections, meaning you might just be able to watch BBC content on the go — though mobile devices might eventually report your GPS coordinates along with your IP, and report it to apps like the upcoming Rewatch. And it is easy for software and site administrators to discover and blacklist IPs that originate from VPN servers (again, to its credit, the BBC seems less vigilant about this than Hulu, which actively blocks access from VPN providers).

File sharing: Of course, if you’re looking for your favorite BBC programming, you don’t actually have to use the iPlayer. Just search your favorite BitTorrent site for torrent listings. You won’t be able to stream content, but at least it’s available around the world, is still available a week after airing (unlike many shows on iPlayer) and free from digital rights management restrictions.

Now, why isn’t the iPlayer available outside of the UK? Firstly, because the programming is funded by British citizens through the Licence Fee, which is £142.50 a year. Though the BBC Trust increased the budget for online services last year, Web spending accounts for only around five percent of that money. Any bandwidth costs from beyond their borders would essentially be subsidized by Britons which the Trust probably wouldn’t favor.

What about BBC Worldwide, the commercial arm of the BBC that broadcasts channels like BBC America? Contracts. BBC America earns revenue both from advertising and through carriage fees paid by cable providers. Said cable providers would not be pleased if the BBC made their content available on-demand, free of charge and without broadcast windows that are shorter than the international release schedules.

Still, there is the matter of distribution agreements with independent producers. Like most existing television networks, the BBC has had only a few years to renegotiate existing contracts — much less decide on new standard legal language and terms for online and international rights. And since nobody knows how to value, much less profit from, online distribution, it will probably be a while before those rules are outlined.

I sent an email to the Trust and Worldwide asking about plans to offer the iPlayer internationally, but due to time zones, couldn’t expect a quick response. But for now, I’d like to offer a suggestion: Instead of letting VPN providers make all the money, offer international subscriptions to the iPlayer to let anyone pay for a license. The cost of the television production and online portion thereof, approximately $9 a month, happens to be what one might expect to pay for a fast, reliable VPN service. While I’m not personally a fan of paywalls, easy, expensive access is better than difficult, expensive access, much less no access at all.

And if leaving money on the table isn’t incentive enough, anglophiles can always watch live, online, commercial-free, English-language news anywhere in the world thanks to the cheese-eating surrender monkeys across the channel at France24, which is specifically funded by the French government in order to offer a francophilic counterpoint to the BBC and CNN.

Nothing against the French! But if having to make a tasteless joke that a bunch of soap-dodging, frog-eating Frenchmen are beating the Beeb at cultural imperialism online is what it takes to convince Sun readers to support making the service more widely available, so be it.

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That’s bad news for Azureus Vuze, which had been gaining, and the official client from BitTorrent — both of which lost over 20 percent of their share since last month, with BitTorrent’s client on a losing streak since June. In the “winner takes most” world of the Web, these numbers put uTorrent in a commanding lead. However, Transmission is growing at a rapid clip, posting nearly a 24 percent gain over September.

The Tribler team simply counted the client application reported by peers connected to a number of torrent swarms. What’s not clear is how the location, time, or selected torrents might have affected results — for instance, if Tribler was connecting from Delft, the results may be skewed toward European users.

All of which leaves this Vuze user wondering if he shouldn’t switch to uTorrent. Vuze’s attempts to position Azureus as a media platform and not just a torrent download application just seems to get in the way of sharing files.

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While Harris was mashing up the downtown art scene and that of Silicon Alley techies in Manhattan before and after the turn of the century, The Real World changed the face of television to feature more — and cheaper — so-called “reality” fare and Michael Moore took independent feature documentaries mainstream. Since then, YouTube and Facebook have turned many of Harris’s predictions into the revenue-generating, over-sharing reality we know today. So you would think that a Grand Jury Prize winner from Sundance with a director who’s now earned that honor twice would have no trouble finding distribution on favorable terms. But the Park City festival clearly isn’t the ticket to big audiences and Indiewood riches it may have once been, if Director Ondi Timoner’s decision to market the release herself is any indication.

Director Ondi Timoner (who claims that she’s still owed royalties from her previous prize-winning documentary, Dig!) turned down all offers from the likes of HBO and chose to go it alone — presumably because the contract details were disagreeable. She and Harris are instead barnstorming around the country, having kicked off their tour in New York City last week, with stops in Boston, LA, Chicago, Austin, San Francisco and Seattle planned over the next few months. The tour is meant to fuel chatter on Twitter, where popular users like Ashton Kutcher, with his tweet featured on the movie’s poster, have been promoting the project; and on the film’s web site, where Q&As after the screening have been broadcast live, online. All the promotion is presumably intended to benefit an online release and DVD sales, since without a distributor it’s unlikely to get a nationwide theatrical release.

It’s an interesting challenge to the system in the spirit of Harris. In a telling scene in the movie, Bob Simon of 60 Minutes has to endure Harris openly challenging CBS’s viability in the coming Internet age. Which leaves Simon wondering aloud on camera when his own show will be available online in comparable quality to broadcast — with Timoner slyly cutting to a mockup of the current CBS site where, 10 years later, you can find just that.

So why not release online today? Because the rules of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences demand that it be in theaters for at least 60 days in LA and New York before being shown online (or on TV). Which means you won’t be able to download it until December at the earliest — unlike the web-wide release of Steven Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience, where star Sasha Grey could send thousands of fans straight to Amazon for $9.99 online rentals even before a theatrical release in New York and LA.

While it’s certainly true that a nomination, or even an Academy Award, will doubtless help DVD and web sales down the road, all of the Twitter buzz in the meantime can only be turned into a few ticket sales, not paid downloads. And this was a film made by and for the web: Timoner started shooting footage at Harris’s legendary parties back in 1999, participated in the “Quiet” experiment, and cut 5,000 hours of material down to 91 minutes thanks, in part, to being able to work with others remotely. “The film wouldn’t be here without the Internet,” Timoner pointed out to the audience after a screening Saturday. “It was cut over the Internet.”

For all the revolutionary posturing and DIY distribution, it seems odd to have bent over backward to please the Academy. After all, as Harris points out in an period interview used in the film, there’s only one click between advertising and a transaction online — why not capitalize on that? Then again, Harris clearly values recognition and validation from peers and the public much more highly than money, and maybe in their long association Timoner took that sentiment to heart. For the sake of the film, I hope her self-reliant marketing approach doesn’t prove to be an idea so far ahead of its time that it’s unprofitable.

As for Harris, he’s apparently living in Los Angeles with Jason Calacanis and meeting with television producers to pitch his latest idea, The Wired City, which sounds a lot like Big Brother. That it’s being pitched to television at all, and not conceived for the web, makes it seem like just another gimmicky reality show on television, and from a creator little-known outside a small set of online fans and colleagues.

The business plans for both Public and Wired illustrate the schizophrenia of new media models: on one hand, an online revolutionary pitching television execs he once wanted to put out of work; on the other, a talented independent filmmaker with a movie tailor-made for an online audience hewing to the outmoded rules of the oldest of old Hollywood.

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Like similar reality shows, including Top Chef, there’s so much product placement in Product Runway that the more people viewing it in any medium is simply more value for advertisers. But cable networks have been less willing than broadcast networks to put stuff online out of the fear it would endanger carriage fee revenue paid by cable and satellite television providers, though this is not the first show Lifetime is offering in full episode form online. (Lifetime uses Brightcove for video, but disables embedding — still progress!)

Not that Runway has any trouble attracting revenue, with L’Oreal Paris and Garnier sponsoring a tie-in sweepstakes on the web site and as many as 100 sponsor mentions or more in a typical episode, by our count. The network is also smartly pulling in catty comments live from Twitter and Facebook for the “Buzz Room” site — driving fan engagement and smartly playing up the most enjoyable part of the show, which is snarking with your friends over the inevitable hot mess contestants and their outfits.

It’s unclear what role the Weinstein Co., which produces the show, played in the decision. The company is reportedly in a mess financially, having laid off dozens of employees late last year and hiring a firm to restructure its debt in the hopes of helping cash flow. While those in the know say that the company is placing its bets on the success of Quentin Tarantino’s Nazi-torture-porn flick Inglourious Basterds, if The Kluminator can find more fans online, she might be able to help save the day.

After all, why pay Showtime to air your movies when you can post them to YouTube for free?

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Yes, it’s a niche interest device that will probably only appeal to cinematographers working at a fairly high level (Vision’s cameras have been used for everything from the Super Bowl to Battlestar Galactica). But similar to computer processors, video processors like the CMOS chips used in the Phantom have a way of getting smaller, faster and cheaper at an incredible rate.

For instance, Vision Research has been creating high-speed video cameras for years, and some of the higher-end models will blow your mind — the company’s top-of-the-line camera, the Phantom v710, will shoot 1280×800 HD footage at 7,530 frames per second with a motion-stopping shutterspeed of half a macrosecond. The Miro is much less powerful, but it can shoot full-color, 800×600 footage at up to 500 frames per second — at least enough to turn out some epic footage of snowboarders tearing up the slopes in ridiculous amounts of motion detail. And it fits in a backpack, so you can shoot on the fly.

It does cost $9,900, but can be rented for as little as $375 a day, and the rental price can be applied to your purchase. Prohibitive for your typical YouTuber, but as the CMOS sensors that power it become less expensive, expect to see the high-speed features filter into prosumer video cameras and digital SLRs (which are increasingly being marketed as dual-use for video as well).

For camera geeks, if not content producers, the future of high-speed, slow-motion cinematography is fast arriving.

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Hulu, which updated the legalese on its privacy and terms of use pages a month ago, is warning new users of the policy, and will delete any comments you might have posted since the change took effect. So if you were snarking on a young Claire Danes in My So Called Life thinking you’d be anonymous, think again.

As Hulu’s Eugene Wei explains:

First, we don’t ask a lot of our users to watch all of the content on our site, but we do ask that people be civil in our community areas, like reviews and discussion forums. While anonymity has many benefits to society, helping to maintain a civil community online is not one of them.

The level of discussion in the comments section of almost any popular video on YouTube is an ongoing joke. But Wei admits that it’s still pretty easy to remain anonymous (tip: use a fake “real name”), and of course you can still watch most of the content on the site without registering at all.

The popularity of Facebook, which demands real names from its users, has created a significant precedent of non-anonymity. And Facebook is clearly beloved by NBC, one of Hulu’s parent companies, if the release of a new show on the social network and not on its own sites is any indication. As social networking colonizes online video (and vice versa), you’ll probably see more sites jumping on the real names bandwagon citing community but leveraging it as a commodity.

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But IPREDator also suggests two notable things about the future of file-sharing: One, that “darknets” of network traffic hidden behind proxies and encryption may well make unofficial distribution even easier and less risky for users; and two, that sites like The Pirate Bay, which stand accused of profiting from copyright infringement, might be able to subsidize their non-commercial distribution efforts by offering the tools to share files securely rather than selling ads alongside indexes of torrent files.

To sign up for IPREDator, which is named in honor of the European Union’s Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive, you simply sign up with a username and password on the site, pay 15 euros ($21.41) for three months of service, and follow the instructions to log into the VPN. It took all of five minutes on my MacBook, with no software to download.

One thing to note is that for the privacy of users, the site doesn’t store login and password information, so don’t forget your password because it won’t let you retrieve or reset it. Also, you’ll want to make sure you have a software firewall set up on your machine, especially if you configure a router pass-through — just as a VPN lets you tunnel through ISP filters to get to the sweet stuff, any malefactor can tunnel back through your router to get to your machine.

What the VPN does is securely encode all the information sent and received from your computer with state-of-the-industry, 128-bit encryption, and hide all traffic behind a single IP address. So any site you visit couldn’t identify you, specifically, among the thousands of users represented by that address. Granted, the IP address is in Sweden, so you’ll be out of luck if you’re trying to use the service to access geographically restricted sites like Hulu.

And of course, that also means all the data has to travel to Sweden, then to wherever you were trying to access, then back to Sweden before finally returning to you. Latency, in other words, is a problem. Testing the system on a well-seeded torrent also showed a marked decline in download speed and performance. So as pointed out above, unless you live in Europe, you’ll probably want to look into another VPN service closer to home.

And there are plenty. In a piece for PC World last month, I took a look at a number of different software applications that are being designed to limit access to shared files to a known group, as well as encrypt data transfers and obfuscate IP addresses, many of which are free or, like IPREDator, low cost.

So rather than stemming the flow of unlicensed distribution, the crackdown on intellectual property is driving file sharers closer to the edge of secure and anonymous Internet access, with paid services possibly helping to fund torrent index servers and legal defense funds, and developers working on user-friendly tools to make darknets accessible even to the lowliest noob. So even if IPREDator seems too complicated, expensive or distant to be practical, don’t worry, something will come along soon enough to meet your desperate need to watch the latest pirated movie or international TV show. Content providers should still consider letting it be their technology, and not The Pirate Bay’s.

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On2 Technologies shareholders have filed lawsuits in New York and Delaware in an attempt to block the company’s acquisition by Google. The plaintiffs complain that the company is worth more than the $106.5 million, or 60 cents a share, being offered. On2 develops video codecs that are widely used in Flash video, and owning the company would give Google backdoor savings on software licensing fees from companies such as Adobe and access to On2′s code, allowing engineers at the Googleplex to further optimize its encoding algorithms.

Shareholders have set up a web site, “Vote No To Google’s Current Offer for On2,” with those representing as much as 20 percent of the voting interest in the company having pledged to kill the deal. Google had hoped to close the deal by the end of this year.

The main points of the complaint are that On2 didn’t shop the company around for the best possible price; that the share price at the time of the announcement was depressed by market volatility, calling into question whether offered price actually represents a 57 percent premium; and that the executive compensation and layoff severance package plans represent a “poison pill” that would discourage a sale to other buyers while enriching top management — who hold less than 4 percent of the voting shares.

The $106.5 million seems a pittance for Google, which has $19.3 billion in cash to play with, and even moreso when you consider what the company might be able to save. If On2′s codec was even one percent more efficient in compressing video, Google could probably save millions a month in bandwidth and storage costs for its YouTube subsidiary, not to mention the money Adobe would have to pay Google to license the codec for Flash.

My guess? Another hundred million and the shareholders will put down the torches and pitchforks.

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In the midst of a worldwide recession and an advertising decline — the broadcast upfront was down 20 percent this year — it may sound like great news. But for every dollar spent on TV, search and banner ads, less than 2 cents goes to online video ads.

The good news is that the market grew by 125 percent last year, but it will have to sustain 40 percent growth year over year to achieve the report’s projections of tripling its total share and doubling its online share by 2013, and then still be a bit player in the larger market.

The other bright spot is that for every hour of video viewed, online outlets outpaced television outlets with 17 cents in ad revenue compared with 13 cents. However, the cost of serving all the video that isn’t supported by ads significantly dilutes that 17 cents an hour. And both were down significantly from last year, a trend eMarketer predicts will continue.

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The company has also created portals for video content in a number of South Asian languages, including Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and Bengali. It set up separate YouTube channels in the hope of topping the charts for those language groups as well. It’s also reaching out on Facebook and Orkut, according to an announcement from CEO Rajjat Barjatya.

But Rajshri’s ambitions, and those of other international content partners on YouTube, could end up cut short by business decisions made in San Bruno and Mountain View, Calif.

For YouTube and other popular online destinations, serving videos to Indian users isn’t likely to become a profitable endeavor any time soon. The data is more expensive to serve abroad, and the audience less attractive to advertisers. Veoh ceased serving videos to large swaths of the planet because the potential returns didn’t warrant the existing expense. And YouTube has been under significant pressure from parent company Google to start paying the bills.

In April, YouTube’s director of online sales and operations, Tom Pickett, told the New York Times that the company hasn’t ruled out restricting bandwidth to certain countries in order to control costs. And of course, these matters become all the more pressing to American companies and their investors as the economic slump drags on.

Rajshri can always direct users back to its own sites if YouTube chooses to throttle the user experience within India. Indeed, doing anything to abandon such a market on YouTube’s part might turn more users to local providers and result in a net benefit to sites like Rajshri — never doubt the super-powers of Shaktimaan to draw eyeballs on YouTube or anywhere else.

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