BT Wants Cash For iPlayer, Video Bandwidth

eldavojohn writes "British Telecom is asking for more money for the bandwidth that iPlayer and video streaming sites eat up. The BBC's Tech Editor is claiming that 'Now Britain's biggest internet service provider is making it clear that, in a cut-throat broadband market, something is going to have to give — and net neutrality may have to be chucked overboard.' The BBC and BT are currently already in talks over how to get past this together. This might sound like a familiar battle from over a year ago."

Comments

This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth

[MosesJones]

BT have a TV over the internet offer called "BT Vision" its suffering (and just lost its CEO) in competition with Rupert "any view that pays" Murdoch's Sky. Now if BT could get a richer experience out of iPlayer and access to a longer back catalogue than simply the last 7 days then this would help them in competition with Sky.

So I'd expect this to end up with BT agreeing to support iPlayer in the same way but an "interesting" tie-up between BT and the BBC around the delivery of iPlayer+ features to its BT Vision customers.

Re:This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth

[FrostedWheat]

BT Vision is awful. Depressing and misleading adverts, the sales people on the phone lie to get you to sign up, no lives channels beyond the standard Freeview stuff, poor image quality and even after paying your monthly subscription you still can't access most of their online content without paying extra. The sooner it goes away the better.

Re:This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth

[ZigiSamblak]

This is just BT believing that because they used to be the national phone service they have a right to dominate any communications market and charge whatever they like. We have a similar company in the Netherlands KPN who used to be the national telephone and post service but since they were privatized have shown a total disregard for fair competition from other companies and tried every trick in the book to hold their dominant position so they can abuse it to make bigger profits.

No doubt there are some influential contacts in the government who get paid well for these agreements. If you ask me the expense scandal in the UK is just the top of the iceberg and our governments are basically nearly as corrupt as the US, they just make more effort to hide it.

Re:This is more about BT Vision than bandwidth

[smoker2]

BT Vision is Freeview TV, with a hard drive. The part that needs broadband is minimal. Here are a list of "Features" :

• Pause rewind and record Live TV
  The Vision+ box is a digital TV recorder that lets you pause, record and rewind live TV.
• 160 GB hard drive
  Record and store up to 80 hours of Freeview TV with the huge 160 GB hard drive.
• # Dual tuners
  The Vision+ box's dual tuners can record one or two programmes at once while you watch another recording.
• Record whole TV series
  The TV guide shows scheduling 14 days in advance. Simply press the R button twice to record a whole series.
• HD Experience
  The HD Vision+ box gives you selected films and TV in crystal clear, High Definition picture and sound quality.
• # Convenient billing
  Any pay per view movies, sport, music or TV shows you watch will be added to your next BT Vision bill. If you take one of our Value Packs, you will be billed in advance each month.

Combined with bittorrent, I already have what they are offering. Except their speeds are derisory. I recently switched provider to Be, and experienced a doubling in download bandwidth, and a trebling in upload bandwidth, for 25% less per month including a fixed IP. Plus BT claimed that "it was not possible to get faster speeds on my line". Funny that, considering you need a BT phone line to sign up with Be. But now I'm not with BT broadband, I can't get BT Vision. So there was no net neutrality in this case. All their stuff was prioritised already.

Non-issue

[Brian Gordon]

This shouldn't be an issue at all; the BBC's ISP should be charging them a fortune for their high bandwidth use and then the squabble is between ISPs for peering costs. Also BT should be charging by the gigabyte instead of offering unrealistic "unlimited" packages that cause problems when people actually use their bandwidth.

Share the cake... or make the cake bigger

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

So video over IP is wasting BT's bandwidth eh? How about increasing the bandwidth instead of reducing the share of it subscribers are allowed to get? This is typical greedy telco mentality: let's milk the existing infrastructure for all it's worth, instead of investing in said infrastructure. Heck, if Japan or Korea ISPs can provide very high bandwidth residential internet to their customers, why couldn't the UK? This is called investing in the future, and it's what we need in times of economic crisis.

Re:Share the cake... or make the cake bigger

[slim]

The only issue here is who's going to look like the bad guys for making the populace pay for upgrading BT's infrastructure. BT would prefer that the BBC do the squeezing, that's all.

This is exactly right, but it's pretty evident that the BBC shouldn't be paying for general-purpose bandwidth. Just because iPlayer's the driver right now, doesn't mean all kinds of other services that rely on high bandwidth will benefit.

If it's to be subsidised (for which there is a case - having consumers with good connectivity stimulates the online economy) it should be from some other form of taxation.

Solution

[sakdoctor]

BBC shouldn't give a penny to BT. They should cut them off.

From the perspective of BTs dumb mass audience, who chose BT because it bundled the prettiest ADSL modem, the word will quickly spread that BT is pants because your can't get "teh TVs".
Problem solved.

Competition

[jonbryce]

When people sign up for broadband, one of the main things they want it for in this country is iPlayer. If iPlayer doesn't work well on BT Internet, they will go to another ISP where it does work. That will be a selling point for their competitors. For that reason, BBC can tell them to get lost.

Needs a translation

[L4t3r4lu5]

"We oversold and can't cope with the costs. Subsidise us."

Well, fuck you BT. You made your bed; Lie in it.

Having worked with...

[OneSmartFellow]

..BT (not for them, mind you, just with them on technical projects), all I can say is that if BT (and OpenReach) would spend more on their hardware and infrastructure and less on their asinine marketing and the outsourcing of their customer support (which is a hugely inefficient operation), and all the other stupid crap that they spend money on, this would be a none-issue.

Hey, BT, you still have a freaking monopoly, despite the creation of OpenReach. If you can't make money with a monopoly, you deserve to go under.

BT's Heavy User package

[Some Bitch]

BT have a Heavy User package (£20.54pcm) that contains the following as part of it's description...

Downloading 3,333 music files, 26 videos or streaming 40 hours of iPlayer every month

If you can't afford to provide it then don't advertise it, fuckwits. Manage your customer's expectations properly and stop making promises you can't keep, it's a much more sustainable business model.

Simple solution

[Roger W Moore]

This is just BT believing that because they used to be the national phone service they have a right to dominate any communications market and charge whatever they like.

There is a simple solution to this: the BBC should just ignore them. If they decide to limit or block access to iPlayer then I'm sure their competition will make mincemeat of them given its popularity. All they need to do is advertise that they have iPlayer access and let the market decide - this is one time that leaving things to the market might actually work.