The Doctor and the PC next door September 4, 2007
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Internet , trackbackThanks to the BBC’s new iPlayer service, I’ve been watching the reruns of Dr Who which are screening on BBC3 four nights a week, and boring my friends silly with how great it is and how David Tennant is wonderful thinking girls crumpet. They all, being TV owning people, saw it a couple of years ago.
The iPlayer is a great idea, works well and quickly, though it does have a few foibles. They missed putting the last two episodes of the second series up last week, so I had to watch Daleks over London through my shaky laptop freeview card, and missed the second to last one completely. Its a beta programme though, so the odd glitch is fair enough.
More importantly, and something I think the BBC (and for that matter, Channel 4 with their 4oD product) should be a lot more clear about when you sign up, is the way the downloads work. I imagine that most people believe that they are downloading programmes from the BBC itself, but this is not the case. The system uses peer-to-peer networking, meaning that everyone with iPlayer is providing bandwidth and space for others to download, using a piece of software called kservice. While I’m watching the Doctor battle Cybermen, my neighbour may be getting the programme from my PC. In theory, this isn’t such a bad idea, and is perhaps a fair price to pay for a free service, but it does cause problems. If you’re on a capped service, where you are limited to a maximum amount of bandwidth used each month, it may not be long before you exceed this limit and are charged more or perhaps even cut off. It also uses up bandwidth and space on your PC which you may want for something else. Worse still, it runs all the time, even when you’re not using the iPlayer, unless you explicitly turn it off in the Windows Task Manager.
Personally, I don’t have an issue with it because my Virgin / Blueyonder 4Mb cable can chew through just about anything and I’m grateful enough for the Doctor to be happy to donate, but for many people it may be a problem. TV companies need to be much more open about this when they release iPlayer
into general use, and provide a way for non-technical users to switch
it off easily.
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