Technology Corner

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

  As BBC’s iPlayer service gets more and more popular, UK ISP’s start complaining about bandwidth uses. Is this the first wake-up call?

The iPlayer, the TV on-demand service from BBC (available to UK users), has been around since Summer 2007 but had it’s official launch only on Christmas day. Since then, it has grown immensely in popularity and functionality, with the first figures showing over 250,000 stream requests per day and recently reaching as high as 500,000.

Although it is well know that TV habits are changing with more and more consumers shifting from conventional TV to online media, the bandwidth costs can’t be dismissed lightly. ISPs in the UK estimate a cost of £830 million to increase network capacity.

Who should pay for all this?

On one hand I can understand the ISPs: they see a dramatic increase in operation costs due to a trend that didn’t exist until a few years and to keep with service quality these costs need to be matched; On the other hand, publishers understand what consumers want and know that to keep ahead they need to provide more and more content, independently of whatever costs the ISPs may face.

So, now comes the question: to keep the quality standards (ISPs) and still satisfy consumer demands (publishers) who will end up paying the bill?

Ashley Highfield, director of future media and technology for the BBC, claims that ISPs should pay to keep their clients happy, without limiting access to content.

“Content providers, if they find their content being specifically squeezed, shaped, or capped, could start to indicate on their sites which ISPs their content worked best on (and which to avoid). I hope it doesn’t come to this, as I think we (the BBC and the ISPs) are currently working better together than ever.“

Simon Gunter, from Tiscali (a UK based ISP), answered back and, although directed specifically at BBC, raises and issue that could affect all major publisers.

“The question is about whether we invest in extra capacity or go to the consumer and ask them to pay a BBC tax. Inflammatory comments about blacklisting ISPs do not help. There seems to be a lack of understanding about how networks are built. Either we are not explaining it properly or it is falling on deaf ears.“

Widening the scope

This question was raised in the past few days, mainly because of the impact the iPlayer is having (affecting around 3 to 5% of the UK network) but the issue could be widened to a global scale.

I think there are no doubts about the impact that online media is having on communications and how the general public is embracing on-demand and citizen generated content (look at the success of youtube.com). It’s here to stay and will only increase in a cycle that will affect ISPs and ultimately consumers.

On a brilliant marketing strategy, ISPs started offering “unlimited” bandwidth, “unlimited” downloads, “unlimited” everything… and oh look, so cheap. There is no such thing as unlimited. But if they offered it, it should be kept without capping any sort of content from any sort of provider.

Unfortunately for them (and alas, probably also for consumers) their business model started cracking. Not everyone uses the web only to check email and read the news anymore. Times, values and demands changed and, instead of fighting mindless fights about who should pay the bills it’s time to move on, go back to the drawing board and come up with something new to keep everyone happy.

Easy? Not really… but business is made of challenges.

The way I see it, either

• ISPs will start again to introduce limits on how much bandwidth consumers can use which will mean much more selectiveness from the consumer’s part;
• Publishers will pay the extra costs but it will probably mean that advertising will be much more prevalent;
• Plans will just get more expensive for the consumer.

And now it’s your turn? What do you think will happen? Should ISPs, publishers or consumers pay the bill? Voice your opinion in the comments section bellow. I think we have a subject open for much debate in the times to come.

Other sites discussing this:

- HighPosition.net

- ISPreview.co.uk

- What Hi-Fi?

- Neoco

Related on this blog:

• TV losing more and more ground to Online Media
• The Siege of the Entertainment Industry