Just tried the BBC’s iplayer for the first time. Pretty good, actually. It basically works, the image quality is good, download speed is fine. The download manager is pretty clunk and limited — you can’t control how many things it downloads at once for instance. The DRM is a pain because you have to use windows media player to watch stuff back; normally I am a VLC man, and I miss having the keyboard shortcuts.

Shortly after downloading a few things, my download speed plummted. I think Virgin have chocked me for blowing my download limit, which is the first time this has happened. I managed to get a "0" reading on a download speed diagnostic; strangely, it also showed I have a 2MB upload which makes no sense at all. Is cable not asymmetric?

Update

Take it all back. IPlayer installs kservice.exe as an automatic systems service. This spams the outgoing connection even after terminating iplayer. Moreover, it’s a CPU hog, that turned my machine to treacle. This rather disingenuous blog post mentions the problem, says "it’s outside the scope of this article" and suggests you firewall it out. I have a better idea; the BBC should switch the damn thing off. Very, very poor.

Originally published on my old blog site.