BBC iPlayer Beta Review

August 3, 2007 · Filed Under Internet, Television · Comment

Well today we received an invitation e-mail for the BBC’s iPlayer beta, this included a difficult to remember user name and password which I had to write down. Once logged in to the service, after a few attempts at trying to use the login again on a second login box, I found that I was required to register my own secondary user name and password! this was not too clear so it was rather annoying.

I eventually managed to log in to the service, so I checked out what was on offer and I am pretty pleased; BBC programmes like Doctor Who, Hyperdrive, Coast, Blue Peter…whatever has been showing on TV over the last 7 days.

So I attempted to download an episode of Doctor Who, but being a Firefox user I was not allowed to do it, so I had to switch over to the dreaded Internet Explorer eek! once on the Iplayer site in internet explorer I was then prompted to download the Iplayer Setup program, OK that seemed fair enough, once installed it gave me the BBC iPlayer library, a program which sits in your task bar (yay another thing on my task bar!!), which will allow you to watch the progress of the videos you are downloading.

In addition to the BBC iPlayer library there was something else, the Kontiki Kservice.exe and Khost.exe processes were installed, this includes a peer 2 peer client embedded, meaning people will be downloading the programs you downloaded from your pc, taking your bandwidth! (this makes sense for the BBC not having everyone downloading the content from just their servers, putting a strain on the system-the P2P effectively creates a big network of many users computers to download from) but for many users including myself this isn’t great. I am familiar with the Kontiki processes as I already have them running on a PC from Sky by broadband(or Sky Anywhere as I believe it is now called), while the processes were running I found that I experienced significantly slow web browsing, due to the P2P gobbling up my bandwidth, so whenever I start up that computer these days I immediately end those processes.

Any way back to the programmes, I guess you’ll be wondering how much space you will need, well a 30 min episode of hyperdrive came to 149mb, a 45 minute episode of doctor who is 193mb, and an hour long episode of coast is 399mb, it seems that programmes are being distributed with different bit rates (quality).

Currently the iPlayer is in beta stages and will only support Windows XP, hopefully when it releases properly to the public it will be compatible with other operating systems.

Tags: BBC, Iplayer

Sky content coming to your PSP

August 1, 2007 · Filed Under Gaming, Internet, Television · Comment

Good news for those of you in the UK and Ireland, Sony has partnered with BSKYB to bring you downloadable films, TV shows and Videos.

The content will apparently be available on a subscription or pay per view basis, will current sky subscribers have to pay anything in addition to watch the content on the PSP format?

Details are unclear at this current time, all shall however be revealed later this month when Sony announces it at the Leipzig games convention in Germany.

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