Behind the scenes of the BBC iPlayer
What's happening behind the scenes at the BBC to make the iPlayer TV catchup service work? CNET's Nate Lanxon sits down with the BBC's Anthony Rose to find out.
My CNET UK colleague Nate Lanxon has a great behind-the-scenes look at the BBC's iPlayer. We've covered the product several times here on Webware, but Lanxon sat down with the BBC's head of digital media technologies, Anthony Rose, to talk about all the work it takes to get TV shows onto the Web and on mobile devices. It's a great read, even if you're not a UK resident.
Some fun tidbits:
- The service converts more than 400 hours of programming each week
- During peak hours, BBC iPlayer pumps out 12GB of data every second
- The source content starts out at 50 or 100Mbps
- The service uses 60 Quad Core Intel Xeon servers to whittle those videos down into 14 different streams for various devices and connection levels.