On the BBC Internet Blog, Ashley Highfield has posted "Hidden Costs" of Watching TV Online? with a 19-point Broadband Charter covering the BBC, iPlayer use and the ISPs. He says: "I put all these points down to get the conversation going."
I'm not advocating them (except where I explicitly say so), but we are pulling our thoughts together here at the BBC, and liaising with the ISPs both individually and through the Broadband Stakeholders Group, and with the BBC Trust and Ofcom, so your thoughts on these points are, as ever, very welcome.
Some are not going to provoke much disagreement, such as: "ISPs should be clearer in their marketing (Ofcom can help them). Unlimited broadband should mean unlimited." Some are novel, like the idea of downloading programmes "off-peak to the user's hard-drive pre-transmission (hidden and encrypted), to be ready to be unlocked immediately after the programme has gone out on traditional linear TV". In some cases, it's not clear what Highfield wants: what sort of "intervention against BT Wholesale," for example, and why?
The issue of "unlimited" bandwidth and peer-to-peer file-sharing -- which is how the iPlayer does its downloads -- is a topic I've been blogging about recently (here and here).
It's mostly not a BBC problem, as far as I can see. However, it has been something that the ISPs have warned or complained about (possibly for publicity reasons), and growing iPlayer use could be what finally tips the system over the edge....
