TEA London News and Opinion
The BBC iPlayer - Did recent upgrades create wobbles or is there something more troubling going on with UK's internet?
2008-08-25
Just before the end of the UK summer holidays, it was clear that the BBC had fallen into some sort of pre-Olympic malaise, typical of the 'silly season'. Our programmes were low budget productions or rebroadcasts as people back off and take their kids on holiday to somewhere sunnier.
We have a handy add-on to our Firebox Internet browser, which is the Alexa Statistics toolbar, which shows information about the traffic trends and rankings of the world's busiest web sites. The BBC at the time of writing, is ranked 49th in the world. What was interest is that the past few months have shown an incredible drop off in traffic, and this could very well be an indication of the effects of the summer season.
Over this period the BBC iPlayer developer released an updated web interface where they reorganised how you can browse for week's past broadcasts. They also added an optional High-Quality on-demand video stream for most content, which enables visitors to select between original video quality, or improved video and (more noticeably) sound quality at the expense of using more bandwidth. They have also added a 'resume' feature which, sometimes, as it does not seem to work all of the time, allows you to continue watching a programme if you interrupted or paused the viewing earlier on.
Since the changes we have noticed that the site has begun to perform poorly, particularly with on-demand video content.
We initially suspected that this may be glitches with the system, and have found that the playback of on-demand content has become more unreliable. Sometimes video would just stop dead, and will not continue playing. You have to refresh the page, start the stream from the beginning and search through the content to find your place in order to resume viewing before the interruption.
Sometimes video content would not start at all, in other cases only the high-quality content would work and the standard quality content would freeze more readily.
During this time we noticed that the site's traffic was steadily increasing again, towards the start of the Olympic games, and since then the site has been unpredictable in terms of its reliability and responsiveness. We suspect that traffic to the site did increase substantially over the past few weeks, especially as the summer holidays near their end.
Our question now is the poor performance related solely to the recent changes implemented to the site, or is there a more far reaching problem lurking below the surface? Is the iPlayer causing the UK's internet infrastructure to slow down, or are ISP's being more aggressive in managing their bandwidth?
From our perspective our internet connection has been as fast as ever, where download speeds (even from the iPlayer download service) are just as fast as ever. Which leads us to come to the conclusion that either the BBC did experience technical difficulties with their latest release of the iPlayer, or my ISP is deliberately slowing down traffic of this nature.
At the time of writing the iPlayer service was more reliable, perhaps because fewer people were on the internet over the bank holiday weekend, but some content did just stop playing.
Let us know what you think.
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