Free Porn, Forever?

The advent of the BBC iPlayer has meant a significant increase in the volume of traffic across the Internet in the UK. I believe that for purposes of PR payments, contractual and regulatory reasons the iPlayer is only available in the UK. So aside from the recently discovered (and now fixed) bug in the player software that allowed the streaming programmes to be downloaded its impact on Internet traffic outside the UK is nil.

However iPlayer isn’t the only streaming video service and its peer-to-peer download service is not the only video download delivery system. The consequence being that as YouTube and its adult cousins like You Porn and Porn Tube proliferate and become more popular the Internet infrastructure will eventually begin to show the strain.

The outcome of this is that the Internet will either fail, or as is more likely someone will have to stump up the money to make sure it doesn’t. If the Internet fails, the Web fails and if that fails business and government fail. A recent report by Nemertes Research predicts that the net could go into “gridlock” by 2010 without significant investment. It’s one thing giving everyone fast broadband to their homes, but that has to be supported by a backbone of incredible bandwidth and flexibility.

So, as the UK’s ISPs are claiming that it will cost the best part of £1billion to accommodate the extra traffic caused by the BBC’s iPlayer, how much for YouPorn, PornTube et al?

Would you pay for extra infrastructure that you’ll never notice? After all, we only notice when we can’t get a connection to the Internet, not that we aren’t having connection or speed issues.

Someone will have to pay and what that amounts to is that if you and I the consumers want to use streaming video and peer-to-peer networking and file sharing the cost of using the net will increase. That might be directly through our connection charges or indirectly as firms start to charge for viewing content.

Interesting times ahead, don’t you think?

Tags: IPlayer, BBC, video on demand, IPTV, peer-to-peer file sharing, Nemertes Research, Internet gridlock, Internet capacity, YouTube, You Tube, YouPorn, You Porn, PornTube, Porn Tube