BBC iPlayer risks overloading the internet

The success of the BBC's iPlayer is putting the internet under severe strain and threatening to bring the network to a halt, internet service providers claimed yesterday. They want the corporation to share the cost of upgrading the network — estimated at £831 million — to cope with the increased workload. Viewers are now watching more than one million BBC programmes online each week.

The BBC said yesterday that its iPlayer service, an archive of programmes shown over the previous seven days, was accounting for between 3 and 5 per cent of all internet traffic in Britain, with the first episode of The Apprentice watched more than 100,000 times via a computer. At the same time, the corporation is trying to increase the scope of the service. It is making its iPlayer service available via the Nintendo Wii, allowing owners who are unable to stop playing in time for their favourite programmes to catch up with them later.

Tiscali, the internet service provider, said that the BBC and other broadcasters should “share the costs” of increasing internet capacity to prevent the network coming under strain. Ashley Highfield, the BBC's director of future media and technology, said: “We are having an impact, but we don't believe it is a great one - and it would be a unique way of using licence fee-payers' money to help internet service providers with their business model.”

However, a spokesman for Tiscali said that the BBC was deliberately underplaying the problem, arguing that internet providers had to “overbuild capacity in our networks” because they could predict how many people would want to watch television via the internet. “This cost would then be passed on to our customers — in effect a BBC tax levied on top of the licence fee,” the company added. The problem for Tiscali, though, is that its concerns are not widely shared in the industry. BT, which provides a key part of the UK's internet infrastructure, said that the problem, “while real”, could be solved. It said that the key was not speeding up connections to people's homes, but through improvements in “backhaul and core networks” — the links that operate up and down the country.

The iPlayer service has rapidly become a hit after it was introduced at Christmas, even though it involves either watching a programme on a computer screen or finding a way to link the computer to the television. There were 17.2 million requests to watch programmes last month, an increase of 25 per cent on February.

The Nintendo Wii tie-up means that all BBC programmes transmitted over the last seven days will be available to 2.5 million homes with a Wii —- but similar tie-ups with Sony, maker of the PlayStation, and Microsoft, maker of the XBox 360, appear unlikely. It is already possible to watch BBC programmes transmitted in the past week to a PC or Apple Mac, but the corporation was keen to work with Nintendo. Erik Huggers, group controller at the BBC's future media and technology division, said: “Nintendo has helped to reach a broader range of people with the Wii.”

Most watched:

1 The Apprentice - BBC One 26/03/2008

2 Louis Theroux: Behind Bars - BBC Two 13/01/2008

3 Ashes to Ashes - BBC One 07/02/2008

4 Torchwood - BBC Three 21/03/2008

5 Dawn . . . Gets Naked - BBC Three 14/02/2008

6 Torchwood - BBC Two 16/01/2008

7 Doctor Who: Voyage of the Damned - BBC One 25/12/2007

8 Torchwood - BBC Three 20/02/2008

9 Gavin and Stacey - BBC Three 23/03/2008

10 Dawn . . . Goes Lesbian - BBC Three 21/02/2008

Further reading: BBC iPlayer targeted by hackers; Internet TV slow to catch on despite BBC iPlayer