The IP Development Network, a UK based company specialized in IP networks, just released a very interesting paper about the costs of HD movies to ISP.
The paper claims that a user that downloads a full HD movie (around 9gig) costs about 20 British pounds to the ISP.
This is of course something that no ISP will be bale to bare. With the growing popularity of HD movies (check out for example the number of HD trailers at Apple trailers site) this is a very important question. Who is going to pay for the huge amount of bandwidth needed to support HD?
Today most ISP charges a monthly fee without limiting the user bandwidth (limit is set just on speed). But maybe tomorrow ISP will have to start charging users per gig of data they consume (more like what happens today with Internet in mobile phones).
Or maybe they will charge the sites offering the movie downloads?
We as consumers will love to get more HD content, especially when more of us will start connecting the computer to the TV using operating systems like Windows Media Center. But are we willing to pay for it? History shows us that it's very hard to get people to pay for services in the Internet. Music services are still straggling to convince people to pay for their music downloads.
If no good answer will be found for this problem, we can expect not to see HD getting too far in the web world.
