It's not quite tax payer money, we pay a licence fee to be able to watch live broadcast which funds the BBC (they also get a vast amount of money from licensing shows overseas). But your point is true that the public would be pissed if they just rolled over and paid without fighting Trump

They'll tell the ISPs to block 4chan's IP addresses. It's what they've done with tpb and others. Next they're coming for VPNs under the whole "won't somebody think of the children" play.

It didn't help that the first campaign was already underway when the show started, and for a long time their audio was pretty terrible

Like most people here I bought a lifetime pass years ago and Plex just works (it passes the Wife Acceptance Test).

However, I am planning on spinning up Jellyfin and giving it a go and seeing what it's like. I'm a bit nervous reading and things like multiple versions of the same movie displaying separately but I also think I saw a plugin that fixes that.