Quietly, just before Christmas the BBC released a new version of iPlayer. You'd have to have been hunting to find this - it was announced on the BBC blog by Anthony Rose, but to actually get hold of it you need to be part of the BBC Labs trial - this isn't hard, you just click the button on the BBC Labs site, and you'll see a button that looks like this: What this enables people to do is to download programs and watch them later. What's the real impact? It means, that if you think ahead you can guarantee to watch a show without any breaks in streaming. It's not much ahead either - my experience so far is that the download of a 60 minute show takes between 15 minutes (off peak) and 60 minutes.
What is the impact of this going to be? I predict more impact on ISP's - increased bandwidth usage by consumers, as those who previously didn't get a great iPlayer experience during peak viewing times can now plan ahead and download shows to watch later - so total traffic in the UK used by iPlayer will increase, and ISP's costs associated with the traffic will also increase. I'd also expect to see some real impact on mobile networks - the ubiquitous USB dongles that are being sold now are an ideal solution for downloading a show - simply plug the USB dongle into a netbook, and you've got the ability to download and watch shows at your leisure, without worrying about ensuring you get maximum signal strength at any given time.
With the impact of the credit crunch restricting the free cash that consumers are willing to spend in the UK I'd expect to see even greater usage of TV entertainment during 2009. It looks like another painful year for providers of internet data services.
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