BT wants to start charging online video services for delivering their content to consumers.
BT Retail managing director John Petter told the Financial Times these sites have had a “completely free ride” on BT's network for too long.
BT last week began throttling the speeds of services such as YouTube and the BBC iPlayer to 784Kbps between 5pm and midnight, down from non-peak time speeds of 8Mbps. But Petter insisted these speeds were sufficient for video streaming.
“We can't give the content providers a completely free ride and continue to give customers the [service] they want at the price they expect,” he said.
Petter wouldn't say “how many millions” video services were costing BT, but said it was a significant sum.
“Despite its popularity, the BBC iPlayer is just one of many services on the open internet and only makes up a small percentage of total internet traffic in the UK,” BT said in a statement.