The ramifications of my Mum and Dad missing Eastenders
Posted by Ben Rometsch on 22 February 2008
Dave Tomlinson of the ISP PlusNet has added a fascinating post to the company blog discussing the effects of the BBC iPlayer on their network traffic. I talked about this a couple of months ago, and the effects of the iPlayer appear to be taking hold.
The two killer stats, in my opinion:
- 66% growth in volume of streaming traffic since 1st December
- Cost of carrying streaming traffic increased from £17,233 to £51,700 per month
And that's the increase in a single month!
At present, it's technically quite tricky to get the iPlayer working on your living room TV. It can be done (Home Theatre PC, connecting your Laptop to the TV etc etc) but it's not easy. Funnily enough probably the simplest way of doing it at the moment is with a Nintendo Wii, making use of the excellent Opera browser and associated Flash plugin. I digress. What I mean, and the relevance of the title of this post, is that for my Mum and Dad it's simply not going to happen on their living room TV set. They will have to sit crouched around their desktop PC.
What they need is something like an Apple TV, but even simpler and cheaper. Something that comes with a wifi connection, a flash player and an HDMI output. You could probably make a slice of profit retailing them at £80. Comes with Linux and a flash player capable of decoding the H264 codec. Plug it in, connect to your wifi point and away you go. There's definitely a nice business there, and you can be sure it will run on Linux!
Anyway, once that comes onto the market, you can expect those figures of Dave's to go absolutely crazy.
I'd say that at this point there are a few things that we can now predict with a fairly high degree of certainty:
1. Any ISP that is living on the edge in terms of profitability will be bust within 2 years
2. A lot less unmetered bandwidth products from service providers
3. The BBC's bandwidth bill is going to start getting seriously, seriously big
4. A lot of consolidation within the ISP market, with the big players that can strike good deals with the top tier networks hoovering up the smaller providers.
And finally, I cant see anyone using the terrible, terrible P2P client software that they are using as one of the delivery mechanisms. It's practically malware, doesn't work nicely with the channel 4 or ITV software, is horrible to install, does nasty things to your machine, it's just terrible. People don't care about the fractional loss in quality. They want instant streaming with no software to install, and that means a flash client.
Anyway, if you are reading this and have made that Linux based flash client, please send me one so that I can placate my mum when she calls me about her extraordinarily large bandwidth bill.