iPrimus unmeters ABC TV’s iView: who’s next?

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Thursday, 11 December 2008 12:25

IT Industry - Strategy

In the “old days” when Telstra was still Government owned, this kind of deal would surely have been a no-brainer – Telstra would likely have been the first to offer unmetered access to ABC’s iView.

But in the new commercial world, Telstra likely doesn’t want gigabytes of bandwidth being sucked up by programming that Telstra doesn’t own or control. The same is likely the case for Optus and the other ISPs.

Hundreds of gigabytes, even terabytes of data must be being generated by iView, but with Telstra and Optus owning cable Internet and ADSL 2+ infrastructure, surely their networks can handle it.

After all, iiNet, Internode and iPrimus have managed to do it, so we can only live in hope that Optus, Telstra, TPG and other ISPs will figure out a way to do it, too. And that's despite Optus and Telstra so far saying they're not interested in offering unmetered iView, wanting to concentrate on their own content services instead.

Perhaps Senator Conroy should make it a condition of the National Broadband Network that anyone reselling NBN Internet services must offer ABC iView on an unmetered basis.

Commercial television operators wanting to offer similar catch-up services might want unmetered access too, but if they are selling advertising around their video streams some kind of contribution or payment to the underlying NBN operators, or the Government itself, might be in order.

With the NBN years away, these issues should be well sorted by the time the NBN is truly switched on.

Having download limits rise into the hundreds of gigabytes or even the terabyte domain might make the need for unmetered access irrelevant, although with video streams now moving into “high definition” territory, streaming video will only suck up even more bandwidth.

So Telstra, Optus and all the other ISPs out there: when will you offer your customers an unmetered ABC iView TV service?