iPlayer comes to Virgin Media

April 30 2008
by Ed

iplayer

Good News, the wonderful BBC iPlayer is coming to users of Virgin Media’s cable TV service, let’s hope the flaky infrastructure of Virgin Media can cope with the demand.

This poses an interesting question does it not, on one hand the ISP’s like Virgin Media are upset that applications like the iplayer are hogging broadband capacity, while on the other hand the same content delivered to set top boxes using the same fundamental network is OK.

Maybe Virgin Media is behind Net Neutrality after-all…

Written and submitted from home, using my home 802.11 network.

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2 Comments leave one →
2008 April 30
Chris Fleming permalink

I think that this system is actually using Virgin’s existing VOD (Video on Demand) infrastructure.

This means that Virgin users using the BBC iPlayer via a set top box won’t use internet bandwidth (interconnect bandwidth between Virgin and it’s peers) only internal bandwidth on the virgin network which is better for virgin. I suspect they can probably also stage popular content close to users.

Theres a little technical details at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2008/04/bbc_iplayer_on_virgin_media.html

2008 April 30
Ed permalink

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your insight.. I understood that virgin also had constraints on their internal network also which was restricting HD content for example ?

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