CNet has an interesting interview with the BBC's Head of Digital Media Technology Anthony Rose today that deals with the present and future of the iPlayer. Rose shares some specifics about the aggregate bandwidth use of the iPlayer and the percentage of users that access the service with their mobile phones, but he also has some intriguing things to say about P2P:
"P2P did work very well for us, but times change and our saying we're not using P2P now doesn't mean we will never want to use it again. We may find, for instance, that we use multicast for live video or a live P2P in the future. The one thing that's constant in the tech world is that things change, and as of today, direct download makes the most sense for us. But things may change in the future. "
The iPlayer was initally based on Kontiki's P2P technology, which the BBC finally ditched last December after pretty much concentrating on the web version for a long time. However, the BBC has also been cooperating with the P2P Next project on a possible open source P2P streaming solution.
Source: CNET | P2P-blog
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