A story doing the rounds in a number of UK newspapers and blogs (Independent, Financial Times, The Mail on Sunday) is that ISPs are increasingly worried about the BBC’s iPlayer, which, were it to catch on, could place an unacceptable strain on their networks. The solution, says Tiscali chief executive, Mary Turner, is for the BBC to contribute to bandwidth costs. While other ISPs are talking about implementing ‘packet shaping’ as a way of penalizing iPlayer traffic so as to maintain speeds across the rest of the network. The result would be that, during peak times at least, the iPlayer could become painfully slow.

From The Mail on Sunday:

Senior executives, including BT Retail’s Ian Livingston, The Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone and Tiscali UK’s chief Mary Turner have held informal talks amid growing anger over the BBC’s hitching a ‘free ride’ with its new iPlayer system for downloading TV programmes over the web.

In a previous post titled ‘Will ISPs spoil the online video party?‘, I noted that Channel4’s peer-to-peer catch-up service was already being penalized by ‘packet shaping’, and that other UK ISPs, such as Virgin Media, are taking more of a sledgehammer approach by simply reducing users’ download speeds during peak hours.

While ISPs clearly have a capacity problem inherent in their business models, something they’ve kept quiet for years, I object to the notion that the BBC, YouTube or any other online video service is getting a “free ride”. Without digital music and video acting as a main driver for broadband take-up, then many of these ISPs wouldn’t be in business in the first place. In part, ISPs indirectly sell customers access to the content sitting on the network, which in-turn, most web sites provide for free, paid-for through selling advertising. The symbiotic relationship between content and network providers has existed for years.

Also see: BBC iPlayer review - one week later

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Other posts that may be of interest

• Cerf: Expect the Internet to radically change television
• BBC iPlayer puts rocky start behind, begins building solid user base
• BBC iPlayer for iPod Touch, iPhone within weeks
• Look mum, no DRM: BBC launches iPlayer on iPhone and iPod touch
• BBC partners with Adobe to add iPlayer streaming option; Mac and Linux will be supported
• Weekly wrapup, 13 - 17 August 2007

This entry was posted on Monday, August 13th, 2007 at 5:55 am and is filed under Net TV. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.