Posted: 11th May, 2009 By: MarkJ
The BBC's iPlayer boss, Anthony Rose, has revealed in an interview with ZDNet that on a big peak usage day its service can eat up a colossal 100Gbps (about 12.5GigaByte’s per second) of broadband bandwidth (total). The interview (
here) also talks about what we can expect from iPlayer 3.0 and why the BBC backpedalled on its controversial P2P based IPTV download service (no mention of how some big ISPs moaned about what that did to their networks, a lot [Tiscali]).
Anthony Rose said: "I think that at the moment, just for streaming, iPlayer uses about 60Gbps of bandwidth (that's about 7.5GB downloaded every second) in an evening peak. I think about 15Gbps for downloads and about 1.5Gbps for iPhone. So overall on a particular peak day we may hit 100Gbps (about 12.5GB per second) although typically it'll be somewhat less than that. That turns out to be up to 7PB of data transfer a month."
On the subject of its P2P player he added: "Additionally, some people didn't like their upload bandwidth being used. It was clearly a concern for us, and we want to make sure that everyone is happy, unequivocally, using iPlayer. P2P did work very well for us, but times change and our saying we're not using P2P now doesn't mean we will never want to use it again. We may find, for instance, that we use multicast for live video or a live P2P in the future."
Presently the BBC's iPlayer service is being dominated by its web-based platform, which doesn't use P2P and generally does not require any additional downloads, except of course the FLASH plugin for your web browser. It looks like iPlayer 3.0 will be all about "
personalisation and socialisation", with users being able to setup favourites lists, alerts and related customisation.