Licence payers love the BBC’s iPlayer, the new version of which is formally launched earlier this week. Network admins, however, are being warned to beware of its ability to eat bandwidth at a fearsome rate.
The hazard warning from WAN optimisation company Blue Coat about iPlayer v3 is at least as old as last May’s iPlayer beta, but is probably worth bearing in mind for anyone running a network of employees who might be tempted to catch up online with their favourite TV shows.
Of particular note is the new ‘favourite’ programme feature which sets the client to automatically download future episodes. According to Blue Coat, this could end up being the equivalent of up to 630MB of data transfer per hour, per programme, per user, or double that if the programme is downloaded in high definition.
Blue Coat doesn’t mention it, but the social media integration in v3 could also have some bearing on when this bandwidth is now consumed compared to past versions.
The BBC sees demand for iPlayer use from v3 onwards being driven increasingly by social networks and less by what is known in jargon as ‘linear TV scheduling’, otherwise known as ‘TV watching’.
“In order to get more users to iPlayer, we needed to make iPlayer something more than TV catch-up alone - we wanted it to become a driver of demand, so that you returned to iPlayer daily to see what new programmes were there just for you,” as a BBC developer put it at the time of the May beta launch.
If correct, this will inevitably transfer some of the load from after-hours TV catch-up to in-work TV rubbernecking. My friends on Facebook watched this so I will too.
“BBC iPlayer is making the unmissable, unmissable, but network managers need to make sure that their users don’t make the network unworkable,” said a Blue Coat representative.
Blue Coat has complained about other bandwidth-consuming applications in the past, notably Spotify.
Comments
Cyteck said: The answer is ITS BOTH its an on-line web interface from which you can view TV programs but the iPlayer is also a downloadable application ie the BBC iplayer desktop which you can download amp install but this is mainly for those people who want to download BBC content to their local machine for playback at a later time Its a bit like collecting a book to read later rather than reading it now One involves streaming the TV shows over the web the other downloading the program as a file for local playback ie not streamed
Alan said: The answer is simple Just set your firewall to block streaming media then theres no danger of swamping the networkAfter all dont you go to work to work Theres plenty of time to watch TV in the evening
jtt said: Cyteck is it software I though it was just a web page
Cyteck said: The irony is that the new iPlayer version 3 is a worse piece of software than the previous version version2 The new iPlayer is now more bloated amp more complicated than the previous version which had the balance between form amp functionality amp ease of navigation controls about right The new iPlayer is horribly more complex amp far less user friendly its a step backards in my opinion Ill probably now use it less because of this which is annoying if it aint broke dont fix it