iPlayer TV problems tonight

[Dave2002]

Tonight (Sunday 2nd December) we had major problems with iPlayer and Live feed for BBC2 and BBC1. We have BT broadband, and the serice should be more than good enough. The exchange is within 4 minutes walking distance and on a reasonable day we get 70 Mbps. It is unlikely that there will be a local flash crowd causing a bottleneck in the BT networks.

There seemed to be problems with the router, so I rebooted it, but the problems remained. I also tried different wireless connections, in case the issue was due to local wifi.

We gave up for a while with BBC, but I found that we could get Channel 4 and other streaming channels without problems, so it seemed to be specific to BBC.

I noticed that the Dynasties programme - in UHD - was on at the time. I just wonder if the BBC servers are actually not capable of handling such a large data load.

Has anyone else noticed problems.

This is enough to make us more interested in trying to get free to air (terrestrial and satellite) broadcasting fixed, though this has been a challenge. I am hoping to get an aerial engineer out to help to sort out some of our problems this week, and/or I might have to try some tests of the cables if I can't get anyone to look at this soon. I was rather hoping I wouldn't have to and that digital services via internet would be good enough for the foreseeable future.

[jayne lee wilson]

I watched the (heartbreaking!) Dynasties episode on the Painted Wolves as it went out, and the final episode of Little Drummer Girl (minor TV masterpiece, surely) as recorded off the Sky+HD box later... no problems here off the Sky Satellite feed... no recent problems via BT HH5 for BT Sport or other downloads/catchup services recently...(on BT Infinity 2 Unlimited...)

[Dave2002]

Whereas we had insuperable problems trying to watch Dragons Den. It could have been a regional issue, or as I came to suspect a problem with the servers at the BBC end, or it could have been a protocol/network issue. There was no doubt in my mind that there was a problem.

It worked better on iPads than on larger TVs - which might indicate some form of negotiation between the origin servers and the client device, but even watching on iPads eventually hit a problem. There are many possible video on demand algorithms, and we don't know which ones the BBC uses. Some are compound models depending on the network load. We also don't know which communications modes the BBC uses, though hopefully it uses something based on multicast rather than unicast which would require a dedicated link for each user. Bandwidth skimming is one method, which scales logarithmically with the number of users and provides some features which iPlayer offers to some users - fast forward, rewind, pause etc. but it does require a back channel to the server. OTOH multicast streaming with error correction probably doesn't require much in the way of backchannels, and at the origin server end shouldn't look much different from unicast to a single user - apart from a larger payload for the error correction.

We just don't know, but I do know we experienced problems last night around the time when the Dynasties programme was being shown. Whether it was due to the network or to the BBC servers is impossible to say at this time. It could still have been due to local issues in our house, but it seems unlikely as we were able to watch streams from other channels on several different pieces of kit at that time. We did not bottle neck the networks in our house by having more than one piece of equipment active simultaneously. It could have been due to wireless internet locally, but again that normally works OK.