In reply to Morgan Woods:
> As someone living outside the UK, can I just say FFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU BBC!
Don't they have an iPad app for the US at least now? I think its a sort of beta roll out for the international iplayer. There's nothing special about the BBC's position though, you can't watch Finnish national TV outside of the country, and if I remember right, you can't watch Aussie channels outside of Australia because my Aussie mate tried last time he was here.
There are various commercial services offering proxy server access to iplayer. Some are free but seem a bit wonky, I pay six quid a month and that service works very well, but you'll be wanting to watch BBC (or other UK channels) quite a lot to make it worthwhile I guess. Kids BBC programmes are so much better than Finnish, so that's the main reason why I pay. Would prefer to pay direct to the BBC though and not let a middle man make money from it.