He told the IBC conference in Amsterdam in a keynote address on Friday (via Broadbandtvnews.com): “It is not a concept of aggregation, but federation. It’s about making sure each of the broadcasters around the world can continue to have a direct relationship with their users.”

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Answering James Murdoch’s no-holds-barred assault on the “state-funded” BBC and its stifling of commercial content companies, Huggers responds: “(These) investments are going to be made available to public and private companies so that they don’t have to invent the iPlayer or look at how to deliver free-to-air.”

When the Beeb said it would offer the iPlayer to other public service broadcasters in December 2008, it was, alongside the Canvas open IPTV project, a bid to highlight the value licence fee-funded initiatives can have for the entire UK media industry. The Beeb later said the iPlayer could support forms of “monetisation” for commerciall broadcasters. To underline that point, Huggers told IBC that one of the most popular search terms is “Coronation Street”, ITV’s long-running soap opera.

Perhaps it would work for ad-funded ITV (LSE: ITV). Despite growing popularity for its own ITV Player, it doesn’t have quite the VOD traffic of the iPlayer, which is available on 23 devices.

But don’t expect much enthusiasm from pay TV companies BSkyB (NYSE: BSY) and Virgin Media (NSDQ: VMED). In Sky’s submission to the Digital Britain report, it accused the BBC of undermining satellite and cable TV services by licensing its VOD technology to PSBs and criticised it for not sharing its content with commercial VOD platforms like Sky Player (the Beeb only allows links to iPlayer content).

An overseas iPlayer has also been mentioned previously—but all these are just proposals and still need the support of the BBC Trust and, crucially, the backing of commercial broadcasters more used to publicly attacking the BBC than jumping into technology partnerships with it.