UK ISPs have reportedly been expressing concerns about the BBC's new iPlayer service and saying the corporation should make a contribution towards the cost of delivering video across their networks.
Providers including BT and Tiscali are worried that having thousands of people receiving content from the BBC will increase the strain on their networks.
The recently launched iPlayer allows users to view a choice of the last week's TV programmes, and will eventually include some archive material.
In the first week after launch, it had been downloaded 120,000 times, and the BBC predicts that it will have 500,000 users of the service within six months. It is this kind of traffic that concerns ISPs.
I'm not sure why the BBC is being singled out though, as Channel 4's on demand broadband service has almost 500,000 users taking up the service providers' bandwidth, not to mention countless other online video services.
ISPs are charging us plenty each month, promising increasingly faster download speeds and, when a service comes along to test these promises, they start to complain.
Graham Charlton is Editor at Econsultancy. Follow him on Twitter or connect via Linkedin or Google+.
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