Chaser's War on Servers takes down ABC's IT

Not content with trashing celebrity egos and throwing the recent APEC meeting into disarray, The Chaser team has also been giving the ABC's servers a hard time.

Speaking yesterday at the Broadband and Beyond Conference in Sydney, Mark Scott, managing director of the ABC, said that the Australian public's increasing appetite for consuming content online has put the broadcaster's IT systems under some strain.

Scott said the infamous episode of The Chaser's War on Everything, in which 11 members of The Chaser team were arrested for breaking the security cordon around the APEC meeting last year, was downloaded one million times after it was shown on terrestrial television.

"On the issue of server capabilities, when you're hit with one million calls from the audience to download a half-hour program and you're dealing with all of that, it's challenging, but we are working our way through it," he said.

"Success has cost us," Scott added. "It almost crashed the entire IT system."

Scott also revealed that bandwidth issues had also affected the Web site of Triple J Unearthed, the broadcaster's unsigned band competition. According to Scott, the ABC was forced to scale back the capabilities of the site due to the broadband conditions in regional areas, which left music fans unable to consume all the content available on the site.

The ABC is set to submit the next of its three-year funding submissions to the government this year, where the rising cost of content provision is expected to figure.

"What we have seen since the last submission is a rise in the cost of ... delivery of this kind of content."

"The government gave us AU$810 million this year. We would argue it's a lot of money but we do a lot with it," he said.