The popularity of the BBC iPlayer has been a bone of contention between the PSB broadcaster and the ISP superleague of Britain, and last week the BBC’s Director of Future Media and Technology Ashley Highfields drew up a nineteen point manifesto on broadband use, a “Broadband Charter.”
The charter lambasted the practice of falsely labelling services as Unlimited, and the much maligned ‘up to’ prefix – Highfields cheekily suggested that ISPs get in touch with Ofcom for “help” on how to do this.
But Highfield, Director of Future Media and Technology at the £4bn-a-year corporation, said the BBC won’t dip into public money coffers to help out:
“I would not suggest that ISPs start to try and charge content providers,” he writes, finger a-wagging. “They are already charging their customers for broadband to receive any content they want. If ISPs start charging content providers, the customer will not know which content will work well over their chosen ISP, and what content may have been throttled for non-payment of a levy.”
The charter stated that a worst-case scenario would see the Beeb reducing the bit rate of iPlayer streams and downloads so that the toll on bandwidth usage would not be so heavy, although Highfield quickly admits that this is “not a desired outcome for anyone.”
A bookmarking system is also on the cards, so that should you download several episodes of say EastEnders, then next time you sign in, follow-up episodes would be prioritised for downloading. Highfield noted on the “very good relationship” between the BBC and BT Wholesale, made mention of the 21CN network and Virgin Media’s 50Mbps trials.
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