14 April 2008
The success of the BBC's iPlayer is putting the Internet providers (ISP) under severe strain and threatening to bring networks to a halt.
ISP’s want the corporation to share the cost of network upgrades estimated at £831 million, to cope with the increased workload. Viewers are now watching more than one million BBC programmes online each week.
The BBC said yesterday that its iPlayer service, an archive of programmes shown over the previous seven days, was accounting for between 3% and 5% of all Internet traffic in Britain, with the first episode of The Apprentice watched more than 100,000 times via a computer.
At the same time, the BBC is increasing the scope of the service. It is making its iPlayer service available via the Nintendo Wii, allowing owners who are unable to stop playing in time for their favourite programmes to catch up with them later.
Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology, said:
We are having an impact, but we don't believe it is a great one and it would be a unique way of using licence fee-payers' money to help Internet service providers with their business model.
However, a spokesman for Tiscali said that the BBC was deliberately underplaying the problem, arguing that Internet providers had to “overbuild capacity in our networks” because they could predict how many people would want to watch television via the Internet. The company added:
This cost would then be passed on to our customers in effect a BBC tax levied on top of the licence fee.
The iPlayer service has rapidly become a hit after it was introduced at Christmas, even though it involves either watching a programme on a computer screen or finding a way to link the computer to the television. There were 17.2 million requests to watch programmes last month, an increase of 25% on February.
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