Who is The Stig?

[#1]

"The Stig" unmasked tonight on the first episode of the new series of Top Gear... only I don't think it was the real Stig. Certainly though the potential reveal has caused people to tune in to Top Gear in droves and the convenience of iPlayer has meant that many can enjoy an extra hour or two out in the evening sun on the longest day of the year. So many in fact it's set a new Plusnet iPlayer record with 1.31Gbps of iPlayer streaming traffic being hit between 10pm and 11pm this evening.

It's a strange kind of job when you have to consult the TV guides every week to see what people will be watching and predict when they will be watching it. The energy companies have been doing it for years,I wonder if they are now seeing spikes in demand not from people boiling the kettle after Corrie but people switching their computers on and watching the night's TV online after an evening out...

[#2]

Holy Cow!

[#3]

[...] to Tommo’s latest blog, where we broke the record for iPlayer usage last night -  We don’t think it’s the real Stig [...]

[#4]

the community so far all so thinks that hes not the real stig http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php/topic,77239.16.html

[#5]

Michael Schumacher is my hero

[#6]

a check on login requirements

[#7]

Why is traffic for iPlayer, a rather pointless exercise in "we'll do it because we can" if ever there was one, allowed to take priority over "real" internet traffic? You know - email, research, app downloads, etc. Going into "network overload" mode, slowing *expensive* PAYG traffic in favour of the streaming pap is not acceptable. The PlusNet traffic prioritisation policy is completely backwards IMO. Yes, streaming media is more sensitive to restrictions than other traffic, but most of it is rubbish. Internet radio, YouTube, webcam chat, catch-up TV,... It's all as pointless and unimportant as the masses of P2P traffic, 99% of which is regarded as piracy. Yet even if someone wants to download the perfectly legal "Linux Distros" the P2P'ers claim they're doing, they get throttled to death. Meanwhile, someone who for some bizarre reason wants to watch a low-quality version of Wimbledon in a little window in the corner of the screen, despite sitting six feet away from a 50" plasma TV, gets to annihilate everyone else's internet experience. :-(

[#8]

[...]  see also : Who is The Stig? [...]

[#9]

Laser - Have you actually tried iPlayer? The HQ streams are so good now you can hook up your PC, laptop, netbook, or HTPC/media player, to your 50" TV and play full screen in damn good quality! I use iPlayer now to catch up with stuff my TiVo missed and/or is not being currently repeated on broadcast TV. It's good enough now that if you only watch BBC, you could do without Cable, Satellite or even Freeview! and remember there's also an HD iPlayer feed now. Seriously, don't knock it. A lot of P2P, gaming etc might be irrelevant to you, but iPlayer is an example of something truly useful and functional. p.s. Internet radio is incredibly useful too. If you don't listen to the radio or music then fair enough though, but Internet Radio has replaced my next to useless FM/AM reception and limited selection of channels crammed with thousands of adverts. And really, if all you do is email, surf and "research" (more surfing), I cannot see how you'd notice a difference at all. Moaning about throttling if that's your usage would seem to be just moaning for the sake of it when I doubt it really affects you at all.

[#10]

Do you know that it was Top Gear and not the British GP highlights that people were tuned into? Do you have programme level visibility over what is causing the usage or do you just know it's iPlayer and concluded it was the Stig thing? I'm interested in how much you can tell from your data. Can you say how much traffic was caused by people coming back from Silverstone and logging in for a replay of what they saw live?

[#11]

We can't tell which show anyone is watching, we can just see that the traffic is iPlayer. Based on how much traffic there was and the time that it started we can make assumptions as what the driver of that traffic was, and in this case the traffic immediately went up as soon as Top Gear appeared on iPlayer and lasted around an hour. I'm there was some Silverstone traffic in there and some other shows too but Top Gear is the most likely suspect.