Changes to live BBC radio streams

[the_bertrum]

(...) they are trying to do here is restrict it back to people who can reasonably be assumed to have paid the fee.

So basically they:
1. got rid of the old, expensive infrastructure needed for traditional broadcasting
2. broadcast by other means to the whole world, instead of just the UK
3. still want to gather money, despite their expenses have now dropped to the floor (and surely have other means of doing it, such as cable-tv or the like)

UK is a weird thing: they "will change, when the whole world changes" (cit. - can't-remember-from-who-though)

It's not the same as other broadcasters, they are still broadcasting on the old infrastructure (digitally, but over the air like before) and they are required to also provide streams and so on so that us licence fee payers can consume the service in other ways we might want as well, but then they are also required to provide us licence fee payers with value for money and therefore demonstrate they have control over who is watching.
If it were purely a commercial arrangement, they'd have killed the over the air years ago, gone fully digital and had a pay per listen/view model.  There isn't another organisation quite like it.