Over the last couple of days, I had become aware that in the UK, we could watch pretty much live what ITV produces across four channels (ITV1, ITV2, ITV3, ITV4). There are some exemptions where rights are not available as such, but this is a pretty good service based on Silverlight. Prior to Christmas, the BBC announced that they would begin simultaneous transmission of their supplementary channels such as BBC News, CBeebies and CBBC. Now they have taken the final step and put BBC1 and BBC2 up on the net for UK viewers to watch live, with linkage to their On Demand service iPlayer. It offers a quite useful main interface but the actual watch live is pretty basic with the video, some EPG information and links to iPlayer but it is there and working although with the Beta tag.
This is an important step, and it will now be interesting to see what the steps are next and what the bandwidth impact will be on the UK’s ISPs – something that Plusnet is normally pretty good at blogging about. They also have to deal with the lack of rights for some programmes.
For me? it suddenly makes my previously healthy bandwidth capped Internet service look really fragile with the 300-600KB per 30 minutes download requirement – my cap is only 20GB, albeit being a peak only service. Makes me wish for the 250GB cap of Comcast in the US 
