Blocking BBC & ITV video streaming

[Rendog]

Hello,

As the World Cup nears there will an obvious few users that will try to watch games live online.

In the company I work for this isn't allowed so I was wondering if anyone knew the best way to block all BBC and ITV video streaming? At the moment we simply don't have big enough bandwidth lines to cover the whole company.

I've only been working in IT support for this company for about a year and as far as I'm aware all that is blocked regarding video streaming are streams that use applications like WMP, Real Player, Quicktime. I am only local support so don't know much in the way of Cisco routers and configuring, etc, however we have a dedicated network support team although unfortunately they are located in the USA.

Now as far as I'm aware BBC and ITV use flash and silverlight respectively. Is it possible to block the servers that the video streams run off or are you better off blocking the flash extension for video streaming (.flv?). Everyone goes through the same proxy so I guess you could setup some kind of rule?

The trouble is we don't want to block all flash applications as some users require websites that use flash.

Any information anyone might know would be great .

Andy

 

[Rendog]

I think the problem with that is that it is hard to know which URL the live stuff will be on, I don't want to block the whole bbc/football site - just anything that has an embedded video stream.

Ah yes thanks Kol, we can probably block the whole website of that one. BBC & ITV will be a bit more tricky.

 

[Rendog]

We do use a proxy server, I think I'm looking into just blocking the embedded video.

For example when a user goes to this web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/world_cup_2010/8387531.stm - it will load the page but just not the player.