An Internet storm has been brewing for some time now, and the latest bit of bad weather comes from across the pond in Britain, where a number of Internet service providers are warning the BBC that its new iPlayer streaming-video application had better not suck up too much bandwidth, or the ISPs will be forced to restrict the use of it, or charge customers more. Not that long ago, Google was getting a similar message from Verizon executives.

The storm in question goes by many names — including “net neutrality” — but the reality is that it stems from a clash of two forces: the Internet providers whose pipes we all have to use, and increasingly bandwidth-intensive applications such as Bit Torrent and Joost. Internet providers have been selling the idea of almost unlimited bandwidth for years, but as more people try to use it the ISPs are finding their networks overloaded (and/or the “peering” fees that they pay are skyrocketing). That’s why almost all of them use some form of bandwidth or packet “shaping” to give some kinds of traffic priority over others.

If you’re an Internet user, this is going to strike you as an obvious cash grab. If you’re an ISP, however, the kind of ultimatum that British providers are giving to the BBC no doubt seems completely justified. As more than one observer has pointed out, streaming-video providers in particular are effectively offloading the cost of bandwidth onto ISPs — and that can only continue for so long.

At Last100, my friend Steve O’Hear makes the point that if it wasn’t for bandwidth-intensive applications like video, people wouldn’t need the high-speed accounts that the ISPs have been making so much money selling. And Om Malik makes a similar point in his post. Perhaps this one falls into the category of “Be careful what you wish for.”

Update:

Speaking of Joost, one of the problems with peer-to-peer streaming video apps like Joost and Babelgum is that they depend on users with fast upload speeds, and Jackson West at NewTeeVee notes that in the U.S. in particular this is a major issue. Meanwhile, one UK Internet provider has distanced itself from the iPlayer story.

From Press Gazette comes news the the Beeb is sending reporter and techno guru Ben Hammersely to Turkey to cover the election using a number of social networking tools, including his blog, Flickr, YouTube and Facebook:

“The BBC has dispatched reporter Ben Hammersley to spend two weeks using new social media web tools to cover the run-up to the July general election.

He will visit four cities and report for BBC World, World Service radio, News 24 and BBC News online.

In what is a first for the BBC, Hammersley will file to his personal blog, he will upload photos to Flickr, video to YouTube, post snippets of text to the microblogging site Twitter, bookmark research on the social bookmarking site del.icio.us and network with people through Facebook.”

Should be interesting to follow this experiment in distributed media. If I were a large media outlet, I would paying very close attention. Ben has a bit more on the deal here.

So Viacom is apparently bragging about how traffic to its properties, including Comedy Central, has climbed by as much as 90 per cent since it told YouTube to take down 100,000 or so of its video clips. And much of that traffic boost is people coming to watch videos, the company says.

To me, this sounds like some premature back-patting by whichever senior executive at the media conglomerate decided to get all medieval on YouTube for hosting things like clips of Jon Stewart, or South Park’s brilliant World of Warcraft parody episode. It will be interesting to see whether those traffic increases stick or not. And it’s also interesting to see that the venerable BBC — an “old” media giant that has been teaching much younger media outlets a thing or two about new media for some time now — has taken a different tack when it comes to YouTube.

The Beeb has signed a deal to host several channels at YouTube, with short clips that the broadcaster says it hopes will drive traffic back to the BBC hubs. Since the Beeb is financed by a TV licensing fee (which it polices using high-tech “TV detection vans”), there will be IP blocks for anyone located in Britain — although not for the BBC Worldwide channel, as PaidContent notes.

This seems like a much smarter strategy to me than just pulling hundreds of thousands of clips (in fact, the BBC has said that it doesn’t plan to crack down on the clips that are already out there). The broadcaster presumably gets some juice from the clips, it gets some ad revenue as well, and then drives some traffic back to the full video content at its own site. Win-win, theoretically — although Ben Metcalfe seems to disagree with me.

Of course, there’s always Mark Cuban’s approach as well. And while we’re on the subject of back-patting, YouTube doesn’t seem to have suffered all that much as a result of the Viacom clips disappearing, and is busy signing deals with smaller content owners, including the NBA. See Mark Cuban’s comment below.

Update:

Seamus McCauley has some thoughts (somewhat conspiratorial) about why the BBC might have wanted to do a deal with YouTube. Could it be all about the licensing fee?

Normally I would post this kind of thing over at my “fun” blog, because it doesn’t really have a lot to do with Web 2.0 or any of that kind of stuff, but I thought what the heck — it’s the weekend, so let’s loosen up and have some (non Web-related) fun. One of the coolest things I’ve seen in a while is the performance art put on by French theatre troupe Royal de Luxe, and they’ve brought their latest show to London this weekend, entitled “The Sultan’s Elephant.” The BBC has a whole pile of photos and videos, in some cases provided by cellphone camera owners and other “citizen journalists” (see, there’s some Web 2.0 to this after all).

It’s loosely based on the work of Jules Verne, and was performed in France last year. It involves two gigantic wooden puppets, one a girl about 35 feet tall and one an elephant with a fully-articulated trunk that is just as tall and about 50 feet long. They are operated by a team of puppeteers dressed in period costumes, who in some cases are pulling ropes through enormous pulleys and in other cases are sitting on a giant metal superstructure that surrounds the puppet. The photos really have to be seen to be believed.