I wrote an article about the bandwidth effect of BBC Iplayer back in early March. My observations were correct, but my conclusions were wrong. By that I mean my basic observation was that despite being hailed a big success, the iplayer does not represent technological or economic sense - creating a huge hub-and-spoke infrastructure for the delivery of program data that would cost a fraction of the cost to deliver via broadcast means. It represents one huge, taxpayer funded, experimental conceit.
Except my conclusion was that the burden was falling on the license payer, where in fact it is falling on the ISPs who have a peering type arrangement with the BBC and are bearing the burden of Iplayer traffic on their lines leased from BT and paid for on a per GB basis. http://community.plus.net/blog/2008/02/22/will-bbc-iplayer-usage-break-the-internet-the-bandwidth-timebomb/
The arrogance of the BBC, piggybacking this entire arrangement is quite staggering. Their view is that ISPs are misrepresenting their products, which are based and costed on the basis of a certain amount of capacity usage per user which Iplayer busts to bits. Every utility we have in this country - electricity, water, roads are based on such a model. If everyone turned on the toaster, or got in their car at the same time, the actuarial balance on which services are provided and charged would be destabilised.
To me the answer is simple. The ISPs should introduce a charging gate by which the BBC pays for the bandwidth consumed by users utilising connections for Iplayer. They get a free ride in every other area of media activity, it's time to teach them the fundamental laws of the market.
What it also should mean is that businesses seeking to build business models in the fantasyland of ad-funded video distribution over the internet should take an immediate reality check.
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