ABC calls for freely delivered content

The Australian Broadcast Corporation (ABC) has called upon the Federal Government to allow for its web content to be delivered to all Australians without the downloads being counted in broadband bills.

In a submission to the Federal Government on National Broadband Network (NBN) legislative policy, the ABC's managing director, Mark Scott, said that "publicly-funded content and services carried over the NBN, including those of the ABC, should be available free to the Australian people".

The NBN company should be "legislatively obliged to devise an effective mechanism for implementing it," he said.

The ABC hosts many bandwidth-intensive applications such as iView, its catch-up television service.

iView allows for video and audio downloads of shows the ABC airs on television.

Currently, only a select few service providers - such as iiNet and Internode - allow access to the content for free.

Scott described how the government would be able to deliver the ABC's content freely.

"One possible mechanism of this kind might be for the NBN company to construct a list of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses for Government Departments ... and other similar agencies and deliver content from those addresses at no cost to Internet Service Providers (ISPs) accessing the NBN," he said.

"As such carriage of public content would represent a cost saving to ISPs, they would in turn be contractually or legislatively obliged to pass that saving on to end-users of broadband services, including not counting content of this type when calculating end-users' data allowance or caps."