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NBC has formed a coalition of companies including AT&T, Microsoft, Philips and SanDisk who will co-operate on the development of DRM technologies such as fingerprinting to prevent the swapping of copyright material.

According to the Financial Times, NBC invited Apple to discuss measures for preventing the copying of content to its various media players, notably iPods, an invitation that the FT says Apple rejected.

Given NBC's decision late last year to withdraw its TV programming<

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from the iTunes Store, Apple's lack of co-operation is hardly surprising. It declined to comment on NBC's approach.

Announcing the new initiative at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, NBC Universal's executive vice-president and general counsel, described the amount of p2p, file sharing traffic as "overwhelming" and not acceptable.

He said that Hulu, the online video store owned by NBC and News Corp, is introducing filtering technology to the video sharing section of the site which is currently undergoing beta testing in the US.

AT&T, a leading US ISP an mobile provider, said that traffic in shared content is a major burden on its network.

"A disproportionately large amount of traffic on our networks is peer-to-peer. The cost of that traffic is passed on to the user base," said James Cicconi, AT&T's senior vice-president of external and legal affairs.

AT&T will have to tread carefully. The US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) as just announced an investigation into another ISP, Comcast, which has been accused of blocking p2p bit torrent traffic.

"Sure, we're going to investigate and make sure that no consumer is going to be blocked," said FCC chairman Kevin Martin.

Comcast has denied blocking traffic, though it did say that some was delayed.