A few months ago a columnist for the blog Reel Pop noticed three of the newest comedy shows on television all had their origin online or use the Web as a gimmick. VH1’s “Acceptable TV,” MTV’s “Human Giant,” and FUSE’s “The Whitest Kids U Know” are all web-to-TV success stories.

The New York Times noticed a similar phenomenon the other day at the Just For Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, where the hottest topic of discussion was sketch comedy and the Internet, not who is scoring the best TV deal.

The planned protests against the BBC, which we reported on a few weeks back, took place today as supporters of the Free Software Foundation (FSC) — dressed in bright yellow Hazmat suits — gathered outside BBC Television Center in London and BBC headquarters in Manchester to demand that DRM be eliminated from the BBC’s iPlayer.

The FSC is accusing the BBC of “corruption” because of the iPlayer’s reliance on Microsoft’s technology and the fact that, prior to joining the public service broadcaster, the controller of the BBC’s Future Media and Technology Group worked for Microsoft as director of its Windows Digital Media division.

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.