iPlayer; licence fee subsidies
The ISP industry sez: People use the iPlayer <>. The iPlayer has massively boosted the average Internet consumption of those people as they watch more video than ever<>. This is costing ISPs money <>. If the BBC doesn’t give the ISPs the money to match this marginal cost, or BT doesn’t reduce the cost of renting extra copper pipes from them, their margins will go down <>. This means they have to pass the cost onto the end user, you and me. Ashley Highfield, at the BBC, slaps their outstretched hand<>, but others at the BBC suggest a BBC-sponsored hardware rollout to help the ISPs cope<>.
If the cost is passed onto the end user, i.e. my ISP fee every month goes up, as a result of a project I have already paid for by my annual TV license, isn’t BT costing me money once for the license, and then every month for providing the iPlayer to the UK population, whether I personally use it or not?
Is this double-taxing for the iPlayer fair (irrespective of whether I use it)? What’s the solution?
PS: the ISP’s claims are logical (if undeserving of pity, given they chose to build themselves on the ‘all you can eat’ model that they are now being buggered by), but what should one make of the fact that PlusNet, from which the ISP outcries originally stemmed, and on whose data a lot of press coverage and models are being based, is owned by BT?
Nothing, given the OFCOM-mandated ‘chinese wall’ between BT’s ISP business and its wholesale pipe rental? Surprise that it be the first to complain, given that complaint invites enquiry into BT Wholesale/Openreach’s pricing policies? Suspicion, that BT wants the government to divert BBC money either to its ISP clients, to protect its own margins by silencing demands for reduced wholesale prices, or to BT directly, for the construction of its 21stCenturyNetwork, which would boost available bandwidth and thus help ISPs deal with the explosion of content/iPlayer consumption? Or something else?
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