TV on ISPs

It seems an impossible task to imagine the Internet without television. Even before the launch of websites such as Google Video and You Tube programming was available to Internet users throughout the world. Anyone, anywhere could download the latest episodes of their favourite television programmes without hours and be watching them instead of waiting months for the latest American drama series to make it to their screens. The favoured approach used to using P2P programmes to download, then came torrents, a faster way of downloading a users favourite shows. the favoured approach, favoured by students such as myself who really cannot be bothered to fork out a licence fee, is of course online sites providing direct links to not only television shows, but films, cartoons and music videos. websites such a TV Links and Alluc operate on the edge of legality by using Asian websites to host their videos. many are removed for copyrite infringedment but will inevitably reappear within days. The reason for this is the avid users of the websites either being the source of the clips and with pure determination to share a particular TV show will get it back online as quickly as possible, or they will scourer the Internet to find another source of the clip, and become a hero on these website message boards.

The key word here is copywrite. If you were to take a popular BBC programe such as QI (Quite Interesting) and type it into You tube, almost every episode (in 3 part segments) would appear on your screen. The BBC seemed rather slow to catch onto this, but once they realised millions of people were watching a BBC licenced funded programme for free, the public saw the launch of the BBC iPlayer. According to the guardian online, the BBC iPlayer gets over 250,000 hits a day, which is staggering considering how new the player is. For the BBC it may be a step in the right direction in terms of technological advance. First we had sky plus which allowed us to pause, stop, record and play any TV show we wanted, now the BBC has offered a service free of charge that does the same thing. With illegal downloading sites such as The Pirate Bay which has over 10 million members downloading television online, it seems only a matter of time before television corporations all attempt what the BBC has done, and put TV online in order to offer a legal alternative to the downloading revolution.

So good news for the consumer, bad news for Internet Service providers, or ISPs. In an article by Charles Arther of the guardian technology supplement, he points towards ISPs being hit by higher streaming costs because they pay by gigabyte consumed. This means that by using the BBC iPlayer, they are hit by massive streaming costs because of the massive amount of people streaming off the BBC website directly, rather than using P2P. So it would seem that the illegal users of website such as Pirate bay actually cost ISPs less money than the legal users of the BBC.

So is there a solution? For the Internet user, yes there is. If you really are concerned about costing an ISP a lot of money then you might consider downloading illegally. But really it shouldn't be the user or customer who have the concerns. Watching television online may not be a new idea but doing legally certainly is and it won't be going away fast. The flexibility the Internet offers to watch programmes when ever you want to is all to appealing. Eventually the BBC and other broadcasting companies will come up with a far more full proof way of providing television for "free." ITV for example streams its advertisements during an online viewing of one of its shows. The BBC will also have to introduce some way of getting licence fees from viewers who watch online rather than on the channels itself. But away from the money making side of broadcasting, online television offers a new, faster and more flexible way of watching television. The broadcasters may not like it, but 250,000 people per day using the BBC iPlayer will surely disagree.