Food for thought

[Rik]

El Reg is carrying a story about what it calls an ISP bloodbath.

"In only its first month of service, iPlayer pushed up ISP costs by 200 per cent, from 6.1p per user to 18.3p per user. This obliges ISPs who are simply BT resellers - and most are - to order more pipes; yet there's no extra income. Remember that this is the low-bandwidth version of iPlayer, not the high resolution, high traffic P2P service, which uses much more bandwidth. And of course, it's early days - we're at the beginning of the iPlayer adoption curve. January's figures involve just 19 minutes of TV per viewer for the month.

(The BBC estimates 17 million programs have been streamed or downloaded with up to 500,000 a day).

In other words, viewing iPlayer today costs your ISP a penny a minute - but the ISP isn't gaining any additional revenue from you. Nor is it being subsidised by the content provider, the BBC, to carry those streams."

[madasahatter]

I think this has been coming for a long time. I seem to remember reading somewhere ISPs moaning about services such as Sky by Broadband and 4OD saying exactly what this article is, and suggesting that such content providers should contribute the cost that the ISPs would incur. Obviously, the BBC iplayer is already showing a huge takeup and exacerbating the situation.

The main problem for the ISP is that things like this are not just going to be used by a certain proportion of their customers like say P2P is, but will be used by Mr. and Mrs. Average as well - it's all going to go horribly wrong. It reminds me of another article I read a while ago basically saying that the days of cheap broadband were numbered because of the increasing demands on bandwidth from applications such as this.

Should be interesting.....

[Rik]

Indeed it should. I suspect the pricing model that IDNet use will be fairly resilient in this situation, but the big boys will be sweating.

[somanyholes]

shame on joe blogs for actually using his connection for something that actually uses bandwidth.

The bbc are already looking at other alternatives that are not flash based to be compatible with the iphone etc for iplayer, have a look at this link for more info, (yes the eu is blowing more money on pointless projects) http://torrentfreak.com/eu-invests-22-million-in-next-generation-bittorrent-client/, the bbc are interested as it would save them bandwidth, I wonder how much multicast traffic they are actually serving at the moment.

Anyway here comes another no doubt bloated restricted spying client on the way, that of course will save the beeb money and give us a nice headache!

woo hoo

[Rik]

I concur.

[madasahatter]

I think that most of the smaller ISPs should pretty much be OK because they tend to have more realistic pricing structures to begin with, and if they are like IDNet make sure they have enough bandwidth, but as for the likes of Tiscali..... what can I say - they rely on the users doing very little with their connection, and as that changes, they are going to become unstuck very quickly indeed.

[somanyholes]

the really annoying thing is that I really like the current iplayer system, it just works and it works well. The beeb are just using the iphone platform compatibility thing as an excuse. Give us something good then take it away.

rant over



this may be my paranoid brain, but I can't help thinking, that they will try and get all torrent traffic through this new protocol, and then add restictions to it to block what they class as illegal p2p and then block the old torrent protocol on the net.

[Rik]

That's not paranoia, that's forward thinking...

[Lance]

So basically, ISP's costs are increasing because they are having to provide the service which they were always meant to!

[Rik]

That's about it, Lance. The IDNet pricing model should stand them in good stead.

[Lance]

Certainly should! 

[MoHux]

But aren't the big boys already showing that they don't have to worry about making things work.

They will lose some, yes, but the masses will still fall for the misleading advertising!

 

[Rik]

True enough, Mo, and be stuck there for 12 months while they consider the error of their ways. OTOH, hopefully, it will force Tiscali et al to increase their prices.