Interesting BBC iPlayer stats

Duke

Duke

Duke

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Quite a lengthly Q&A about BBC iPlayer. Some of the stats are crazy though -

During peak hours, BBC iPlayer pumps out 12GB of data every second, and 7 petabytes of data every month.

..

We create about 14 different formats, ranging from about 160Kbps for some mobile, over-the-air streaming, through to 1,500Kbps for our highest iPlayer SD quality stream, in H.264 played out as Flash. We also create 3Mbps (for standard definition) on Virgin Media, and now for our HD content we create 3.2Mbps HD. So it's about 14 or 15 flavors.
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http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10237793-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20
 
Nymins said:
3Mbps for SD, then only 3.2Mbps for HD?! Seems a tiny jump there.
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Different encoding methods, SD at 3mb via mpeg 2 (DVD standard) is a pretty low bitrate (a dvd will generally vary between 4-8mbit), but the same bitrate for h264 will allow a lot more detail due to the more advanced encoding.

It's a pretty impressive amount of data the BBC are pumping out.
 
Whoa that's a huge amount of data :eek:
And it's only increasing in reputation :D

Looking forward to the next iPlayer :)
 
Werewolf said:
Different encoding methods, SD at 3mb via mpeg 2 (DVD standard) is a pretty low bitrate (a dvd will generally vary between 4-8mbit), but the same bitrate for h264 will allow a lot more detail due to the more advanced encoding.

It's a pretty impressive amount of data the BBC are pumping out.
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Even so, there would be a lot of benefit in bumping it to 4.5-5mbit in the future. Even with the best encoder and careful manual optimisation, you'll be nowhere near source-transparent at 3.2mbit.
 
It's nice to see the baby growing up and maturing.
It was quite depressing after working hard on delivering it. to have battles with paranoid ISP's that threatened to block it.
 
PCZ said:
It's nice to see the baby growing up and maturing.
It was quite depressing after working hard on delivering it. to have battles with paranoid ISP's that threatened to block it.
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I agree I don't see the harm, just to think if they did sign the deal with MS it could make an appearance on 360.
 
1.5Mbps for SD ? on h264 what kind of encoding methods are they using? 1.5Mbps is a huge amount of bandwidth for a video stream, If I remember properly most xvid/divx type video's are around 900Kbps. which are pretty good quality - higher quality than the iplayer.


You can get fairly good high quality from 500Kbps. check out this example.

Hereo's clip 500kbps
Heroes BBC Iplayer 1.5Mbps - certainly not 3x worth quality in bandwidth.

Yes it's they are not perfect, but I'm sure you can guess what quality you could get from 1.5Mbps using a good encoding profile. The main downside is the time taken to encode, but I'm sure the bbc etc have access to specialised hardware based encoding. Also the playback of such clips is a little more demanding I think.

It just seams a waste of bandwidth to me. If they had 1.5Mbps using a good profile, they could achieve a higher quality full 720p stream. Or with 3.2Mbs+ a full 1080p stream at high quality.
 
Thats an insane amount of data..!
I wonder what a site like You Tube its churning out then?

More than the BBC perhaps?
 
blackbadger, I suspect the encoding streams are done with the playback platforms in mind, not just the bandwidth, iirc they are doing something like 14 different encoding profiles for most things.

So the chances are some of the 1.5mb SD stuff is intended to playback on relatively low power hardware (h264 is pretty processor intensive and some platforms won't manage it).
 
Seft said:
Even so, there would be a lot of benefit in bumping it to 4.5-5mbit in the future. Even with the best encoder and careful manual optimisation, you'll be nowhere near source-transparent at 3.2mbit.
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The issue is probably that the average internet connection in the UK is about 4Mbps. If it was a 5Mbps stream, the number of people who could stream it would be much less than for a 3Mbps stream.

h264 quality does depend a lot on the profile used. It gets much more efficient using high-profile features, but also much more intensive to encode and decode.
 
blackbadger, I suspect the encoding streams are done with the playback platforms in mind, not just the bandwidth, iirc they are doing something like 14 different encoding profiles for most things.

So the chances are some of the 1.5mb SD stuff is intended to playback on relatively low power hardware (h264 is pretty processor intensive and some platforms won't manage it).
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Good point!, I often forget not everyone in the UK has uber systems as most of us.. Still a shame, they could offer a 5.1 Full HD profile encode for those with newer hardware, at a very reasonable bandwidth :)

Sky + Virgin also could broadcast at full 1080p at a lesser bandwidth too, or the current res at much higher quality, if the set-top box's could decode it.
Sky SD is approx 6Mbit and the HD is approx 20Mbit - both are pretty rubbish quality. I guess they use a very lossy, non intensive decoding requirement codec of sort.
 
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