June 2nd, 2009 12:27 am

Unmetered SBS content coming soon

SBS are working with a number of internet service providers to offer unmetered access to their online content.

Matt Costain, SBS’s online technical director, said the broadcaster is currently working with a number of internet service providers to find ways to make their online content available to their customers without eating into their monthly download caps.

“We’re in discussion with a number of ISPs regarding unmetering of content. We factored that into the design of the new infrastructure to ensure it would be possible (to do) once we decided to go down that path,” Costain said.

Unmetered access to their content is expected to occur within six months.

SBS’ current serve approximately 2.5 million video and audio streams a month. Long-form programs including ‘Mad Men’, ‘Shameless’, ‘Skins’, ‘RocKwiz’ and ‘Myth Busters’, special edition sports, news and current affairs programming and all of their radio content.

With the introduction of unmetered content, the SBS also plan to increase their online offerings to include all of their broadcast content.

They also plan to stream their entire ‘Tour de France’ series online for the first time and to run highlights of the 2010 soccer World Cup.

“Our overall ambition is to make all of our content available to Australian consumers however they want to consume it,” SBS’ online chief Marshall Heald said.

“So all our commissioned content is now contracted on a cross-platform basis and the large majority of our acquired content is licensed for online distribution as well so that as an organisation we’re platform agnostic.”

However, despite the amount of content being pushed online by the ABC and SBS, audience pick up has been slow, mostly due to the the fact that this content is counted in monthly bandwidth caps.

Australia’s largest ISP, Telstra, currently have a firm policy against unmetered access to the public broadcasters’ sites, while Optus are said to be considering their options. Smaller second-tier ISP’s iiNet, iPrimus, Westnet and Internode are all working with the ABC and the SBS to provide unmetered access.

“I think the broader issue is there’s been a lot of focus on the speed of the network but there’s never been a clear focus on the bandwidth costs and I don’t think that’s been properly addressed by regulation yet,” Heald said.

“We’re certainly operating in one of the most bandwidth expensive countries in the world where there’s also effective double-dipping, as both suppliers and consumers of content are paying for bandwidth. Obviously as the network gets faster, more people can consume more bandwidth, but our preference is to offer what we do on television, which is free content, on a truly free basis.

“And obviously as part of the public sector we’d like the Government to get more proactive in that.”

Both public broadcasters are said to be turning to the Government to take regulatory action against ISP’s who refuse to open up unmetered access to audiences.

Source: The Australian