Poor Auntie. First we discovered that if we wanted to be part of the beta trial of the new BBC iPlayer, we had to be a very specific type of geek. Still, 120,000 people did manage to sign up, but now ISPs are threatening to cut off our access when we do have a chance to get to it.
Pre-emptive complaints and questions have been flooding in to Ashley Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the BBC. For example, Tiscali UK's chief executive Mary Turner voiced this concern: “The internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite. If the iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the internet will get very slow service and will call their ISPs to complain.” Now, while it's only fair to point out that Tiscali themselves offer a plentiful bounty of streamed video material from their own site, it's a legitimate problem.
To make matters worse, the suggested solutions all come down heavily on the consumer. If the BBC were to take the unlikely step of footing the bill to ISPs, we'd end up being charged for it through increased licence fees, and that would include those among us who are not interested in using iPlayer - or, given the restrictions, can't. We can only hope there'd be some sort of rebate for those users in the offing.
Admittedly it's only fair that we pay for what we use but the alternative - paying more for uncapped services - is unlikely to be popular. After all, we all know from reading the news recently that what we suspected all along is definitely the case - we're not getting the broadband speeds we're paying for anyway. Virgin Media have even come out and announced speed capping measures for heavy usage times which have hardly been embraced by the Internet-using public.
What do you think? Should we suck it up and pay for the uncapped services, leaving cheap broadband connections for those who don't want to use services like this? Should ISPs be accountable and be adapting to the wider uses of the Internet? Or should the BBC have had some foresight and worked with ISPs so that it didn't come to the crunch right before the release? As Auntie would have it, have your say.
[via Tech Digest]
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i had it for all of about 2 days, when i gave up as i was still waiting for a half hour episode of the real hustle to get to even the halfway stage of downloading!