During peak hours, BBC iPlayer pumps out 12GB of data every second, and seven petabytes (PB) of data every month. It is insanely popular on Apple's iPhone — but mostly after midnight — and the next version of iPlayer will land this year with some exciting new features.
These are just some of the fascinating facts revealed by iPlayer boss Anthony Rose, in an exclusive one-on-one interview with ZDNet UK's sister site CNET UK.
Rose's official job title is Controller, Vision and Online Media Group, and he heads up many of the BBC's internet activities, including the BBC homepage and the site's search system, as well as iPlayer. Previously, he was chief technology officer at the file-sharing service Kazaa, the music download service developed by the founders of Skype.
From what to expect over the next year of development to a detailed look at the iPlayer's hardware, infrastructure and operation, this detailed interview takes you behind the scenes of the enormous on-demand video service.
Q: What will iPlayer 3.0 bring later this year?
At the moment, we've got the web site — you go there and click play or
you click download. But imagine a future where things come to you,
where you can subscribe to things and have favourites and so on. Users
are clearly telling us they'd like alerts and an online library, and
having delivered HD and video quality that for the most part is similar
in quality to TV, we now turn our attention to the personalisation and socialisation, and customisation of iPlayer.
Although at the moment (iPlayer Desktop) is just a download system, in due course it's going to grow to become more part of the web site. You'll be able to optionally log in to get enhanced iPlayer services: pre-booking, the equivalent of series link, and you'll be able to see which programmes you're subscribed to for automatic download.
How much data is iPlayer really using?
iPlayer
usage on the iPhone is very popular and it's growing strongly month on
month. Here's a fun stat: iPlayer usage, for streaming, peaks about
10pm — just a little later from TV. But interestingly, iPlayer on the
iPhone peaks at about midnight. So people are clearly going to bed with
their iPhone and watching in bed. We also see on the weekends that
there's a peak of Saturday and Sunday morning usage at about 8-10am
in the morning on iPhone.
I think that at the moment, just for streaming, iPlayer uses about 60Gbps of bandwidth (that's about 7.5GB downloaded every second) in an evening peak. I think about 15Gbps for downloads and about 1.5Gbps for iPhone. So overall on a particular peak day we may hit 100Gbps (about 12.5GB per second) although typically it'll be somewhat less than that. That turns out to be up to 7PB of data transfer a month.
Why did you abandon P2P downloads?
I think the internet world has changed in about the three years between
our making a decision to use P2P and now. The P2P proposition was made
in the day a long, long time ago, when distribution costs were really,
really high, and it was felt that our servers wouldn't be able to cope
with the load of a lot of people downloading.
But in the end, what's happened is that streaming is clearly the main proposition, and download is about 10 percent of the total consumption. So if the downloads came directly from our servers, it would add only a small extra on to the streaming piece, and in fact it made it more effective — essentially more cost-effective — to simply have a direct HTTP download of the download files, rather than maintaining the infrastructure for a separate P2P delivery network.
Additionally, some people didn't like their upload bandwidth being used. It was clearly a concern for us, and we want to make sure that everyone is happy, unequivocally, using iPlayer.
P2P did work very well for us, but times change and our saying we're not using P2P now doesn't mean we will never want to use it again. We may find, for instance, that we use multicast for live video or a live P2P in the future. The one thing that's constant in the tech world is that things change, and as of today, direct download makes the most sense for us. But things may change in the future.
Is the iPlayer completely automated?
Most content these days is ultimately on tape delivery, so BBC Vision
might have filmed a programme a year ago or someone may have sent in
footage, and it's often on tape. We will create a programme and it'll
be saved on a digital tape, stored in a secure vault. Then a couple of
days before a programme goes out on TV, that tape is ingested and
turned into a high-quality 50-100Mbps video file. So there there's a
lot of manual handling of tapes.
Above the surface, you see a web
site...
