I seem to have been misunderstood here. My post was rather rambling, for which I apologise, though that's the nature of blogs really. The ABC does, indeed, peer with ISPs through PIPE, and no doubt peers whenever approached to do so.
The problem is that they've started delivering their multimedia content (i.e., the chunky stuff) through the Akamai content distribution network. This makes it difficult for the ISPs to work out what is ABC content and what is from somewhere else, as Akamai have a lot of customers.
Now every ISP of anything more than puny size has an Akamai box somewhere in their network, so most of the content would indeed be coming locally, but the point of Akamai's network design is that if the local box is overloaded, doesn't have the latest content, is down, or any other reason, it falls back to the next nearest suitable node. So this content is normally local, but might not be.
What I'm suggesting is that the ABC work with Akamai and ISPs to work out a solution to this. It could be that ABC content almost always comes from the local node. Could it even be always except when the local node is down, in which case the content comes from the ABC network via peering? Dunno. Bigger brains than mine, who know the area well, should work on it.
My simplistic thoughts sees some kind of multicasting over their peering links to ISPs that sign up to the program, and something on the ISP network caches the content. That way the ISP can push the content as far out into their network as demand requires. Though I suppose that's pushing the cost onto the ISPs, so there's probably a better approach, and smarter minds than mine should be brought to bear on the problem.
Hell, for those of us with sweet, sweet megabit-in-the-teens ADSL2+ links could get really, really nice qualkity.