iPlayer By The Numbers: It’s A Monster
The BBC’s digital video ingestion and catch-up service has now served more than 414 million shows since launching in 2007. Auntie’s future media controller for vision and online, Anthony Rose, coughed up plenty more stats in this CNET UK interview, revealing iPlayer to be a bit of a beast. (NB. This one’s for the stats geeks…)
It eats TV for breakfast:-
—Hours encoded each week: 400+
—Servers needed for the job: 60 (each packing a dual Quad Core Intel Xeon)
—Video formats encoded: 15
—Minutes taken for shows to appear online: 15
It’s a bandwidth hog:-
—Data transfer on a busy evening: 12.5Gb every second
—That’s 7 petabytes every month
—Download servers put to work: 2 facilities operated by Siemens (streams come via content delivery networks like Level3, Akamai and Limelight)
It stays up late:-
—Streaming peak: 10pm
—iPhone peak: midnight
—Weekend peak: 8am to 10am
@robertandrews
May 11, 2009 11:14 AM ET
Posted In: Media & Publishing, TV, VOD, Companies, BBC
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