British ISPs, including giants like British Telecom and Tiscali, are complaining that BBC’s recently launched iPlayer is disrupting traffic and is sucking up a lot of bandwidth, much like the P2P technology.

In the era of disruptive technologies like the torrents, YouTube, Joost or Skype, Internet bandwidth is becoming a serious problem for both customers and ISPs, especially considering users’ increasingly high demand for video content.

BBC has recently joined the club of free online video offers, with its iPlayer, a Web-app that will let you download a wide range of BBC television programmes for free from the last seven days. The programmes you choose to download are stored in your BBC iPlayer Library on your computer for up to 30 days. You then have up to seven days to watch them. Once you download them you don't have to be on the internet to watch them when it suits you. BBC is still testing BBC iPlayer and is making improvements and for that the public beta testing began.

If you're based in the UK and aged over 16, you can apply to join the BBC iPlayer Beta, but there are also some nasty requirements that you need to fulfill.

For example, iPlayer only works with Windows XP. No MacOSX, no Linux, no FreeBSD, not even Windows Vista. A Mac version is in the works but it will not be available until later this year. You are also required to have Windows Media Player 10 or above installed, 500MB of system RAM, JavaScript, ActiveX and Cookies activated, and A video and sound card capable of playing high quality streamed or downloaded programmes. Oh, and you also need a broadband connection.

This is why a group of British ISPs are worried about iPlayer’s success, given the fact that BBC has chosen to use the same P2P technology powering other popular applications like Skype or Joost. Tiscali UK CEO Mary Turner told the Financial Times: "The Internet was not set up with a view to distributing video. We have been improving our capacity, but the bandwidth we have is not infinite. If the iPlayer really takes off, consumers accessing the Internet will get very slow service and call their ISPs to complain."

ISPs are considering the option of degrading bandwidth usage for BBC’s Web-app, unless BBC won’t pay for that bandwidth. The two sides are still in negotiations, but BBC issued a statement in which it declines responsibility about pricing, monthly limits on how much data can be downloaded and fair use polices for customers of broadband Internet.

"Inevitably, some ISP packages will be more suitable than others for the download of large amounts of data," the BBC said in its statement. "All broadband is not equal."

However, it seems that it’s not even the bandwidth that obfuscates British ISPs, it’s the heavy competition that the content delivered through iPlayer brings to ISPs’ similar offers.