Online UK video watching jumps nearly 50 per cent

Growth in video views could mean ISPs need to increase backhaul capacity - or bandwidth throttle customers

Massive increase in UK online video viewing could mean drastic action from ISPs

The number of videos viewed online in the UK has grown nearly 50 per cent year on year, according to figures from digital market intelligence vendor comScore.

The total number of video views in April this year was 4.7 billion, a 47 per cent increase on April 2008's 3.2 billion. Google sites saw traffic growth of 58 per cent to 2.4 billionn, a figure almost 10 times that of the combined traffic of the next nine internet properties (271 million). The nearest competitor to Google was the BBC, which generated 79 million views.

The rapid growth of online video viewing presents challenges for IT managers, and in particular for ISPs wondering what to do if such traffic growth continued. The options available would be extra investment in backhaul capacity, or reducing the download speeds of customers.

The possibility is that unless a service level agreement (SLA) is in operation, customers could find their download capacity reduced - a practice called "bandwidth throttling" by ISPs.

Internet providers and content providers are engaged in a big argument about who should pay for the capacity used by customers streaming video content from sites such as the BBC's iPlayer. Various solutions have been mooted, such as caching BBC content with ISPs, but industry experts warn that if even heftier bandwidth consuming services appeared, bandwidth throttling could be the only alternative.

The traffic growth reported by comScore could be an early warning for UK ISPs of a problem that needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later.

The challenge is likely to become greater as higher-speed fibre-based broadband is rolled out across the UK. BT kicked off its operational fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) trials this week, giving customers access to a download speed of 40Mbit/s, which is not dependent on how far users are away from the local phone exchange – unlike copper-based ADSL services.