iPlayer : Bandwidth Hog or Multimedia Marvel?

This month the BBC iPlayer seems to always be in techie news. If you have not seen this technical marvel before (and shame on you if not), the iPlayer is a service the BBC provide, to allow you to stream shows to your PC - and soon your Wii consoles.

The beeb have come under criticism from ISPs who are demanding they pay for network upgrades because of all the traffic it is generating for their networks.

Now, if I understand that correctly we pay for the BBC and we pay ISPs for internet services, so, indirectly, aren't they asking us to fund the upgrades? Which you can argue is a fair point, we benefit from a better infrastructure. However, ISPs have been delivering an altogether underwhelming service over the past few years with moot promises of "super fast broadband" and "unlimited downloads" for a fixed fee. If they had not shaped the market into a fixed price structure it is much easier to charge customers for the service they receive (and for consumers to get what they pay for). So, if the BBC did contribute to the costs, does this mean a share of the infrastructure will be publicly owned?

James Murdoch, chief exec of BSkyB, has been quoted as accusing the BBC of stifling competition. I can't really see how, true that the BBC is funded in a totally different way to commercial channels, but doesn't this mean that they will never be allowed to stream commercial content. Channel 4 have 4OD and Sky have SkyAnytime, the difference is that most other offerings you have to pay for.

BCS
Techdigest
BBC iPlayer and Wii