maniacmartin

I don’t know how closely you have been following the BBC’s controversial iPlayer that uses torrent-like peer-to-peer technology to distribute programmes aired on BBC TV to users over the internet, but a thorny issue was always the that 3rd-party production companies insisted on DRM being present to limit the number of days that the download will remain watchable to 30 days. That way they cash in on after-sales of DVDs.

The major problem that quickly arose was that the BBC deployed Microsoft Windows Media Player DRM, restricting the content to users of the Microsoft Windows OS. The BBC Trust agrees that this is against their Royal Charter and apparently Mac and Linux clients are in the works.

What I never got, is why they can’t release the content made in-house by the BBC themselves in a DRM-free format, and just apply 3rd-party produced content under DRM formats.

Now ISPs (specifically Tiscali) are moaning that the iPlayer will suck up all their bandwidth and want to charge an extra fee! This is totally uncalled for. BBC pay their internet bill just like everyone else and will pay for the bandwidth used in seeding the programs (to use the torrent term). However the peer-to-peer transfers between end-users will not pass through BBC servers, so how is it fair to charge the BBC for this bandwidth. By that logic, we should be billing the RIAA for bandwidth used by torrents of MP3s.

As we have started to see in USA, ISPs here are wanting to threaten net neutrality by cherry-picking which content they serve, and charging extra for other content (charging the consumer seems to be the American idea, whilst charging the provider seems to be what the British ISPs are pushing for).

People use the internet signed up for that - the internet. Not bits of the internet which the ISP can provide cheaply. We should not let ISPs threaten net neutrality by limiting or charging extra for traffic of a certain protocol or originating from certain IPs. Net neutrality is the reason for the internet’s success. Without it ISPs would be free to charge for traffic originating from overseas for instance.

ISPs should stop overselling bargain “unlimited” packages when they do not have the infrastructure to provide this for the advertised speed. (Just look at Orange and how much slower than advertised that runs at). Packages should be clearly advertised with the speed and bandwidth caps. If ISPs can’t make ends meet, they should charge per GB if needs be, but net neutrality must be kept. They can’t charge for traffic at both ends, then charge an extra fee to a company whose network the packets never go through (which is the case with all packets not from the seed server). Nor can they just traffic-shape it away, because unlike the majority of torrents, all BBC iPlayer content is completely legal.

One idea that would reduce bandwidth usage would be for ISPs to have BBC caches (ie mirrors) in strategic POPs that they own. With a clever client with more complete IP data, it could be made to favour connecting to nearby iPlayers (geographically and on the same ISP), thus reducing backbone usage. This would be particularly beneficial to Tiscali, becuase many of their customers are on LLU exchanges.