07/08/2007 - Tuesday

I was a little hasty the other day when moaning about Sky Anytime and the BBC's iPlayer. On Sunday I was doing my weekly defrag and noticed that I had forgotten to delete Aquamarine from Sky Anytime. I started Sky Anytime to do it, and when I got in My Library to delete it I saw that the percentage was 14%. All I can assume is that because both Sky Anytime and the BBC iPlayer use the same downloading software, when I had the BBC iPlayer open trying to download in that instead of downloading the BBC's tv show it was actually downloading the one from Sky. I left Sky Anytime open after the defrag had finished and Aquamarine finished in roughly two hours.

After the success with Sky Anytime I decided to give the BBC iPlayer another go. Luckily there was a tv show that I had missed watching on Saturday and it was listed for download, so I clicked on it and waited to see if anything would download. After a few minutes the downloaded amount changed to 1 MB, and a few more minutes later it changed to 2 MB and 1%. I left it running for the rest of the day and it took roughly 14 hours to complete the 35 minute episode (which was about a quarter the size of Aquamarine). It worked fine and the quality of the episode was good, but it just took far too long. If it had the same speeds as from Sky Anytime then it would be great. Maybe I just have to wait until the BBC iPlayer comes out of beta and they'll obviously add more capacity for all the people that (might) use it.

UPDATE: Earlier this evening I went onto the BBC iPlayer website to see if they had Grownups for download as I forgot that it was on Sunday and I had seen an advert earlier today. Luckily it was on the "featured" page so I didn't have to browse through Sunday's shows. I started downloading it and saw that it quickly went to 1 MB. I then closed the program down so that I wouldn't keep looking at it all the time and got on with other things on my computer. Around two hours later the status window appeared informing me that the show had finished downloading. This was much better than the previous 14 hour wait! I'll have to make a note of other things that show on BBC 3 and 4 that I don't get chance to watching (due to watching BBC 1/2 or some other channel) and see how quickly they download.