So SHOULD the BBC help cover ISP costs for iPlayer?

[Biscuit]

Heres an idea that will never happen. Why not scrap the licence fee and make the BBC an optional paid for service? I can't imagine anyone wanting to pay £10 a month to watch the abismal rubbish they currently show. The whole cooperation would disappear along with iplayer. Problem solved.

I think i would rather keep the BBC along with the license fee, at least it keeps an advertless standard to which other UK based TV has to compete. If we get rid of it we will basically have the same system as american TV. Plus your ONE person in a densely populated country and i think you will find that there is a very large part of the population who actually watch and enjoy many of the programs on the BBC, i agree there is some mindless crap on there but in comparison to hypnotic, over patriotic and often quite controlling american television what we have is excelent.

I'm quite shocked at the response - personally I think all 'parties' involved whether it be BBC, the ISP's or BT etc, etc. need to get there act together and fast or were gonna have an I-net meltdown!

Yet again WE the British publice have to put up with not only getting technological benfits last. There seems to be a real lack of 'cohesion' amoung the upper echelons of British Power concerning services proveded for the mass public.

Yes the ISP have to adapt to start coughing up the money (which I'm sure they're hoarding it) to upgrade for the future but conversely the BBC also has to play a role as well in helping (maybe not direct finance) but something along the lines 'delivery' of content.

TV lincense is now £139.50 which emcompasses mobile phones, laptops and PC and I'm concerned about delivery of content. We are paying for delivery of content via traditional means so why hasn't their new IPTV service been addressed. And lack of money at the BBC - come on the license fee brings in billions of pounds each year - I should think they can sort something out surely (just hoarding the money as usual - its a British Pastime) and only fraction is allocated for distribution in general.

The BBC Iplayer everyone raves on about isn't that great. Only the past 7 days of broadcasting content is available but compared to channel 4's 4OD service which is a back catalogue of the last 30 days of broadcasted content - Iplayer has a lot of catching up. Basically they need to stop whinging and DO something, because all they're is stalling and hoarding the money.

We are definately going to see an I-net meltdown if something is not done soon as IPTV starts to launch off seriously as the de facto method of Digital Content Delivery Service. Not too mention the fact that I do foresee everyone owning a HTPC system as the hardware technology becomes more discrete and units ending up looking like dvd players/set-top boxes!

The bbc may bring in billions but how much do you think it costs to produce original television material every day? Bear in mind a SINGLE DECENT HDTV camera can cost anywhere from £30 000 to £100000 (example of a studio camera) then you add in the costs of all the other componants in the studio and then you have all the braodcast engineers and production staff which need to be payed every day... Im sorry but the money they get is anything but 'hoarded'.

As for the Iplayer being not that good, its maybe not as good as the 4OD system but thats about as far as i agree with that comment. The streaming service that is offered is fairly impressive in my opinion i mean you can even get it to run on nintendo wiis now, thats a brilliant and quite groundbreaking idea!

[nichomach]

OK, I agree that the ISPs have oversold their bandwidth, no argument. That said, in the great majority of cases, what they're selling is in fact BT's ipstream. This is contended at 50:1 for residential customers and has always been described as unsuitable for applications requiring sustained bandwidth. Even where they're selling an LLU product, the situation doesn't improve that much if at all, since they have to compete at reasonably close to the same price point for similar service. Contention ratios and FUPs used to be unclear, but I think we now all know what they are, and anyone who's claiming that they should be getting 8Mbps all day every day on their domestic ADSL service (especially if they're the sort of person who hangs around on Hexus) is just trying it on. The fact is that CR's mean that we get pretty responsive connections pretty cheaply. What we DON'T get is dedicated, permanent 8Mbps connections for every user. If you want to get an idea how much THAT would cost, have a look at, say, Zen's charges for SDSL, which is a fully synchronous service. That's £299 for 2Mbps and that's still contended, albeit at a maximum of 10:1. 2Mbps of 1:1'll set you back £700pm minimum.

Domestic broadband in the UK is designed for relatively burst-y traffic; web pages, email etc. It'll cope with some sustained traffic (YouTube etc.), which is fine. It ISN'T designed as a content delivery mechanism for high bandwidth sustained traffic like high quality video. Anyone mentioning YouTube in the same breath as something like even SD television programming is daft, frankly - 2 minutes of grainy mobe-captured footage of a cat on a skateboard's equivalent to, say, an episode of Torchwood, is it? Now, I don't just include the BBC in this, I'd chuck in 4oD and C5 etc as well, but all of the channels that have launched VoD services know the above to be true. What they're doing is launching these services and instead of sensibly discussing with ISPs how best to deliver them, they're creating a steaming pile of crap and dumping it into the lap of the ISPs, and by extension their customers. ISPs have the options of jacking up prices to their customers to finance the infrastructure to support these services, traffic managing iPlayer and its ilk out of existence or getting out of the business. All well and good, you say, and good riddance, but the fact is that ISPs delivering contended and fup'ed connections to the majority of broadband users who want to do their banking, shop on Amazon and eBay and send emails to their family members have provided a damned useful service, very cheaply.

What the BBC and other channels are doing is taking an infrastructure that is in no way designed to support their service, and which they know cannot be scaled in the short term to support it and dumping their service onto it. Now what DOES annoy me about this is that the funding that the BBC receive is not just there to generate content; they get about £3.2bn per year and that's supposed to support distribution and investment into infrastructure as well. They're making a big fanfare about this "innovative new service", but when you get down to it, it boils down to either streaming poor quality video from their own servers (you note that they don't make the decent quality stuff available from the connections that they pay for directly), which is hardly innovative, or an off-the-shelf Windows-only P2P product (that's already been brought to market, and better, by other channels, although it's still a bit pants) that DOES make higher quality video available, but then it would, since they're using other peoples' bandwidth to provide it. All the channels know that this is going to cost ISPs a huge amount of money, that it's going to compromise the existing infrastructure and result in poorer connections for people that neither need nor want their service (and at the moment that's the majority of broadband users) and they know that if the ISPs have to engage in massive rejigging of their networks to cope it will result in a substantial cost to the end user, because that's where the ISPs will have to claw the money back from. They don't care. Not their problem.

What all the channels could do is cooperate on IP distribution, work with the ISPs and use some of the budget that they have for distribution to work on implementing dedicated content delivery systems, ideally cacheing of content fairly close to the network edge, while asking ISPs to invest in improving infrastructure behind that. That would serve those who want to use iPlayer and its ilk without messing about with those of us who don't.

I don't want to argue that the BBC shouldn't work to find new distribution channels; they should, as should other broadcasters, but they have repeatedly screwed the pooch as regards IPTV and are still doing it; firstly, they spend millions upon millions allegedly on developing a facility which they know is required from the outset to be cross-platform, and then when it pitches up it's a half-arsed implementation of Kontiki, which is Windows-only. When this is pointed out to them, they bung in some streaming media servers and claim that satisfies their obligation. It doesn't. They launch the service without consulting with or cooperating with the people who are actually saddled with getting the content into peoples' houses, and then claim (initially) that the impact is "negligible" and then when its proven that it isn't say it's the ISPs problem to deal with.
The ISPs need to invest in their delivery infrastructure; that's a given. But so do the BBC and other channels.

[Biscuit]

By the way if anyone is interested in an ISP which offer excelent service then i would recommend Aquiss. My dad uses them at home (the little town of northallerton), we get excelent speeds in comparison to some other ISPs and their customer service is great. They dont pretend to offer unlimited usage or anything liek that.

Look at their home 30 deal, i think that its pretty good.

[b0redom]

But that can't work. If the BBC invest and others don't, then the BBC will be subsidising the content provision of other networks - which people like ITV have said that they don't want.

Paying for an infrastructure roll out also has other implications:

• How do you decide which ISPs to choose?
• How do you decide when to upgrade the infrastructure you've put in place?
• What if it breaks? Who's responsible?
• As has been said before what would happen if one ISPs network becomes heavily contended, leaving the BBC streaming with problems?

[WestleyTDPR]

I doubt anyones still reading but lets try an analogy:

I make goods and i pay to take them to the market (The BBC).
People who want my goods pay to get the goods home (The User).
They choose which bus company (or other transport type) to use (The ISP).

Would you really expect a high street store to pay for an upgrade to the roads just because the bus company were running out of seats due to people shopping there regularly and riding the bus more?

No!

The bus company would have to:
find more seats (become more effiecient)
change the way they charge (stop selling season tickets with 'unlimited' travel)
or buy the right to run more buses (add another pipe)

A slice of the BBCs ISP costs eventually gets to the infrastructure, as ISPs pay for their connection, so they will already be paying to 'upgrade to road outside the shop' as more visits take place.

The ISPs should thank the BBC for giving people a reason to buy their services!

Capitalism at its finest, however Rosie was right, they should never have privatised it, then your ISP would have owned the infrastructure, and we wouldn't be having this debate.

Maow

[Sinizter]

Been thinking about this, and the ISPs are just looking for a scapegoat who can be potentially milked for a little cash.

I doubt the BBCs traffic holds a candle to all the torrenting that is happening on their networks - except that they have nowhere and no one to go and bitch about it.

[Splash]

I've not read this thread beyond the first few posts so forgive me if I'm repeating anyone else's point but... are ISPs collectively billing Apple for iTunes? How about Google for YouTube?

They need to get their house in order and start selling products that they can provide in my opinion. My ISP has strict limits on how much data I can transfer at set times during the month (they're very generous limits, but strictly adhered to) and if I go over those limits I get stung. And so I should.

The days of Unlimited* broadband are on their way out in my eyes - I'm happy to pay a pretty decent amount (in my eyes anyways - I'm not at the bargain basement end of the scale) to get the service I want, and I get it.

[Agent]

Could you imagine Bittorrents bill?

[Biscuit]

Could you imagine Bittorrents bill?

I NEVER torrent anymore but i can image my dads wouldnt be too attractive

[Russ]

no

that would be like saying, xbox live should give money to isp's could you can download and stream from the market place, what pap.

[menthel]

Of course not. If only people could get past the bargain basement prices they can pay to the larger, service poor ISP's and actually just pay out the money (which may come with sensible download restrictions) for a decent ISP!

The BBC are providing a great service, included within the license fee we already pay and I don't want to sneakily pay money to ISP's I don't even use.

ISP's and BT, sort out the infrastructure!

[114thDeath]

Iplayer info is only like 400mb, thats nothing compared to all the game demo's out there 1.5gb+. If a new game demo comes out you can actually feel the slow down in the internet.
If the bbc had problems they could limit the transfer speed but as they have invested money and made a good system why should they?
I'm sure all the people viewing utube make up just as much bandwidth as bbc. We have one of the slowest internets in the world. have we upgarded the system since Graham Bell made the phone? or BT just taking the money and laughing!!!

Perhaps a test is in order. for a week no one uses iplayer and week after everyone use's it. see if there really is that much difference from it. Do the ISP's have actual data or just going for the first company they thought of.

If you made the BBC pay how would that work for people who watch it from other countries?

As to not take any more badnwidth up answers on a post card please.

[Sinizter]

Do the ISP's have actual data or just going for the first company they thought of.

They are going after the only company they can think of

They cannot go after youtube, they cannot go after game developers, they cannot go after torrent sites, they cannot go after anybody or anything ... The only target they could find was the BBC.

[this_is_gav]

Iplayer info is only like 400mb, thats nothing compared to all the game demo's out there 1.5gb+. If a new game demo comes out you can actually feel the slow down in the internet.

And how often does such a game demo get released, plus the only additional strain should be on the server, not the ISP - unless half your street is downloading it at the exact same time. Your argument I agree with, but your reasoning is off.

[Ferral]

Thing that gets me in this is that the same could be said for any streaming media and not forgetting legal movie and game downloads on PC and Xbox.

A lot more is available now than what was a few years back thanks to broadband, it is the same for sites like Youtube, some of the vids on that are extremely long. Not forgetting the 4 on Demand and Sky Anytime (granted Sky and 4 don't stream the media but you still have to download the file and then it is shared via the Kontiki service which is similar to P2P and torrents).

More and more people are using digital distribution in its many forms and the ISP's need to move with the times and meet the demands of their users. It should not be on the shoulders of the suppliers of these services at all. We all pay for our services to the ISP and also pay for say games on Steam (just as an example that one) so we shouldn't foot the bill either.

Troubling thing is though on my comment on the previous paragraph. Ultimately it will be us the consumer that will suffer in the end. We will end up footing the bill as the ISP's will up their monthly line rental and unlimited use ISP's could end up putting caps on their service.

[Mblaster]

Troubling thing is though on my comment on the previous paragraph. Ultimately it will be us the consumer that will suffer in the end. We will end up footing the bill as the ISP's will up their monthly line rental and unlimited use ISP's could end up putting caps on their service.

If there are infrastructure upgrades that are needed, it's always going to be the consumer that pays for it in the end. If the BBC pay, we get higher licence fee, if the ISP pay, we get higher BB costs, if the government pay we get higher taxes etc.