A few weeks ago Ashley Highfield, former Director of Future Media & Technology at the BBC, posted an article called the “Hidden Costs” of Watching TV Online. It makes for an interesting read and is a good starting point for having a debate on this topic. Ashley raised 19 potential ‘actions’ although stressed that these weren’t necessarily his opinion. More…

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Since we published the iPlayer Usage Effect blog we’ve been doing a bit more analysis of the usage and reading up on what other people are writing.

As before we’ll have a couple of headlines.

• iPlayer usage is continuing to grow but at a slightly lower rate, up between 10% and 25% per hour comparing last week with the same week in January.

• iPlayer streaming outnumbers downloads by 8 to 1.

• iPlayer usage now accounts for approximately 5% of our network capacity. More…

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There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the BBC’s iPlayer in the past few weeks with stories on The Register such as this and this, The Guardian here and here, ThinkBroadband, Screendigest, ZDNet, and hundreds more on other places too, some of which are linked here.

There’s also been lots of talk about the availability of iPlayer, there’s news about plans for the Mac version and a US version too is apparently on the way.

We, though, can give a different perspective, a bit of insight on things and maybe explode a few myths. Here’s just a few headlines:

• 5% growth in total average usage since 1st December
• 66% growth in volume of streaming  traffic since 1st December
• 2% growth in the number of customers using their connection for streaming since 1st December
• 72% growth in the number of customers using over 250MB of streaming in a month since December
• 100% growth in the number of customers using over 1GB of streaming in a month since December
• Cost of carrying streaming traffic increased from £17,233 to £51,700 per month More…

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