BBC iPlayer

So this month my usage limit was shafted by iPlayer.

For those who don't know, iPlayer is a brilliant new service from the BBC that allows you to watch programmes you have missed. Yes I did use the word brilliant, because I think it is - even though it kinda hurt this month...

There are 2 sides to iPlayer. Its first manifestation resides in a flash embedded media player, that will stream content to you of a very high quality. This side of things is not an issue, and works exceptionally. Its other persona is a wolf in sheeps clothing, for those on a capped monthly usage limit.

On the web you have the option to stream the media or download it and watch later. If you take the second option and choose to download the media, it works via a P2P network. This again, isn't an issue - but what is an issue is when after your download has finished, and iPlayer is innocently sitting and waiting for you to watch your newly acquired media, it is feeding the rest of the iPlayer audience as a seed for others to download the programmes, eating away at your cap at a frightening speed.

My ISP has a brilliant online usage tracking service, allowing you to see what you have used and when. I have 20gb of high-speed usage per month, I find it hard to reach 13gb most months, but as I sit writing this now I have about 30mbs left. It took me a good few days of wondering what was going on to realise that iPlayer was the culprit, mainly because in my usage statement it was registering as "Streaming" and not P2P. In hindsight I realise that being that iPlayer is primarily a media streaming service that it would make sense for it to be displayed as streaming.

I think it would be polite for the BBC to give warning about this as most ISP's offer capped deals. I get free usage between Midnight and 8am, so a scheduler for downloading and general net activities would be a great feature for iPlayer, and not to hard to implement.

So the lesson I have learnt from this incident? Just stream it when you want to watch it, or you will be giving away far too much data usage... if you see yours going down the drain, check you haven't fallen victim to the data vampire that is iPlayer.

BBC iPlayer