BBC prepared to retaliate if ISPs stifle iPlayer

Posted on 3 Apr 2008 at 11:20

The BBC's iPlayer chief has warned ISPs not to restrict certain types of internet content, or providers will retaliate.

Responding to ISP concerns about the effect that the huge popularity of the BBC's iPlayer service has had on their bandwidth costs, Ashley Highfield, the corporations director of Future Media & Technology, said ISPs should not try to throttle back high-bandwidth 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)," he wrote on the BBC Internet blog.

He also warned ISPs against trying to pass the cost onto content providers.

"They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want," he says. "If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and what content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy."

Instead, the end user should be asked to pay more.

"All content providers could create packages or tiers of HD content optimised for this new standard tier of 'HD Broadband'," he suggests.

Highfield comments form part of that attempt to address the issues that iPlayer's bandwidth consumption has raised. Highfield places the onus on ISPs and BT, while hoping that technology will come to the rescue by cutting the cost of bandwidth and reducing the bandwidth needed for a good quality full-screen TV picture.

And he accepts that there is at least one thing the BBC can do and has applied to the BBC Trust to implement bookmarking in iPlayer.

"Bookmarking would enable us to know what programmes a user wants, ahead of transmission, and download them off-peak to the user's hard-drive pre-transmission (hidden and encrypted), to be ready to be unlocked immediately after the programme has gone out on traditional linear TV."

Author: Simon Aughton / Reuters