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No unmetered content at SBS online

A funding shortage at SBS means there is no sign of unmetered content coming from SBS Online anytime soon.

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A funding shortage at SBS means there is no sign of unmetered content coming from SBS Online anytime soon.

SBS online technical director Matt Costain has told The Australian the broadcaster is yet to realise a plan to offer unmetered content with ISPs because of the expense of technology needed to distinguish its content from other traffic.

“It’s still a priority for us but, being an under-resourced public broadcaster, we’ve had competing priorities,” he said.

ABC’s iView platform offers streaming video of popular TV shows without extra download charges via select ISPs including iiNet, Internode, iPrimus and Adam Internet.

Costain denies ISPs had shown a lack of enthusiasm for a similar arrangement with SBS.

“Absolutely not, the ISPs are very keen to unmeter the content and I’ve had numerous discussions with most of them — Telstra and Optus excluded — about doing it, and definitely the sentiment is that they would like to unmeter our content and we would like to do it,” he said.

SBS Online streams about 30 long-form programs from the site each week, but the broadcaster wants to make all its content available through its website.

Both SBS and the ABC want the federal government to take regulatory action to make their offerings cheaper for internet audiences. Telstra will not provide unmetered access to the public broadcasters’ sites. Optus has said it is considering its options.

Other networks have recently stepped up their online offerings including the arrival of PLUS7 from Seven and a rebranding for Nine’s FIXPlay.

Disclaimer: David Knox has previously blogged Eurovision for SBS Online.

Source: The Australian

12 Responses

  1. @DansDans

    To ask for more money, they need to rate higher than ‘GO!’… a secondary channel.

    Lets not get started on the plug-hole that is SBS TWO… 🙁

  2. @Craig, and Secret Squirrel

    Almost – if SBS don’t have the resources for it, an entrepreneurial ISP who would like to offer this to the customers (and more particularly, their current non-customers) should fund it. The guy from SBS has cited only the expense as a problem – he should realise he doesn’t have to pay for it.

  6. I take some umberage at this comment:

    “being an under-resourced public broadcaster”

    Dear SBS, you are a semi-commercial broadcaster now. Perhaps ask your clients (ie the advertisers) for some more money…

  8. @Andrew – that’s because Telstra want to keep all of their slowly-dwindling customer base in a “walled garden” (“it’s so nice here, why would you want to play outside?”). Telstra have been holding back the internet (which they thought was a passing fad) in Australia for 20 years and this is just another example of them using their near-monopoly muscle to push everybody else around and thumb their noses at them.

    The only reason that they haven’t died is because they own much of the hardware which they hire out to other ISPs at exorbitant rates, and the considerable inertia of people who have always had their phone with the Post Master General/Telecom/Telstra (a similar inertia to the people who stick with watching the Seven or Nine “news” no matter how obviously awful they are).

  9. @Craig – it’s actually quite tricky for an ISP to identify which web traffic should be counted as unmetered or not. The ABC uses Akamai servers for the content delivery of its iView service. These servers deliver content for many other customers so you can’t just make all traffic from this IP range unmetered.

    I won’t turn this into a communications engineering workshop but suffice to say, it is not a simple thing to implement, and requires technologies to be put in place by both the content owner and the ISP.

  11. I think that all channels should be multicast over the NBN. All free, all live, all available to those with a computer, internet-enabled TV or Smartphone.

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