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So first the BBC iPlayer was made available on your computer. Then it was made available on your iPod Touch and iPhone, now it’s available on your Wii. The end result is its crashing the Internet.
According to an article at TimesOnline the traffic caused solely by iPlayer traffic is around 3-4 percent of all Internet traffic in Britain. Sure, that may not sound like a lot at first glance, but considering Britain is one of the few countries giving the US a run for its money when it comes to who has the most Internet traffic, 3-4% from one single web app is simply amazing.
Now, back to the bit about the iPlayer working on the Wii, it’s a new addition, but quite an amazing one. Basically all you have to do is buy the Internet Channel on your Wii, which you can use for more than iPlayer, then navigate to the iPlayer website and choose your favorite program and enjoy. Essentially what they had to do in order for this to work is to change the codec they used to work with the codec that the Flash player on the Wii uses.
So, all this iPlayer business is breaking the internet, and I can only presume it’s going to get worse as they add more compatibility with other devices to the list. Apparently the Internet providers are thinking along the same lines and want the BBC to pay for part of the now, nearly requisite network upgrade which will cost roughly £831 million.
[via timesonline and the BBC]
“Roughly £831 million”
Would that be a much different from roughly £800 million. Or even just under a billion.
btw, the iPlayer on the Wii is great. Watching TV programmes on a computer screen is not the same as watching them on a TV. The low definition of the Wii does not matter so much cause you are sitting far enough away from the screen that the compression artifacts are not so noticable.
next on the chopping block - google. god knows how much it network bandwidth it is responsible for — dam that BBC and google for offering great products that people really want to use!
the bottom line for me — the ISPs have a responsibility to provide internet service (it might even be in their name). if their customers want to use their product more, then their customers should pay for it, easy as. that is not to say that the 60mil brits should be coughing up £13.33 today for the use — instead this is a capital cost for doing business for the ISPs. and their financial model needs to account for it, and amortize the cost (spread it out) over the lifetime of the investment (the lifetime of these network hard lines - which is a long time)