They must have negotiated some international broadcasting rights; BBC 1 and 2 are on many Dutch cable systems, and show the Olympics live. And that is not because it was easier for them to get rights for this Olympics; they did this with all previous Olympics, too. BBC iPlayer is not available in the Netherlands, though.
This is largely a historical anomaly in the rights. The terrestrial broadcasts were received in the Netherlands so broadcast rights the BBC gets still include this at tleast in some cases.
The Olympics are bought collective for Europe by the EBU/Eurovision and then their members broadcast them so for the Olypics the BBC may have Euopean rights from the IOC.
Are you sure it's for this reason? I always thought it was a bit dodgy - basically some European broadcasters effectively pirate the unencrypted broadcasts. This was only ever speculation, but in some countries channels occasionally disappear for a while and later come back.
I think there was some gray area during the transition to digital/not over the air broadcasting, but I. Doubt there ever was some true pirating. If there were, surely the Beeb and/or Hollywood would have taken legal action.
Also, see http://www.broadbandtvnews.com/2011/01/27/kpn-tv-get-domesti.... The reason that the Netherlands has BBC television probably is historic (and fairly weird; even in the west of the country, one needed precisely the right kind of atmosphere to receive a fairly noisy signal), but nowadays, money does change hands.
I'm sure it was mentioned at some point in my BBC Broadcast Engineer training but it was nearly 12 years ago now so it could be a be figment of my imagination. I certainly remember there was some acknowledged situation regarding the Netherlands.
