Just been forced to "upgrade" to this, despite having no desire to. It’s very impressive. It will only do a single download at a time and is current reporting 10 hours left for a 1 hour programme; the old BBC IPlayer would download in about real-time, certainly after 10pm in the evening. I did manage to download one programme in 5 mins, but sadly the file was only 32k at the end and it wouldn’t play; really, really broken. And, of course, it’s ditched my existing programmes despite promising to keep them.

Apparently, they have ditched P2P for IPlayer Desktop; good idea, if you ask me. Lower CPU load, no upload traffic generally good. But you have to upgrade your servers, guys. And, of course, the entire internet, to avoid the slowest link effect. Very poor indeed. The message boards would be floods of moans; lucky that the BBC had the foresight to close them down.

Ironically, they’ve gone high definition; it was announced on the website. Great idea; a week to download 5 mins, but looks great when you do.

Very poor; has to go down in history as one of the worst damn squib launches I’ve known. I wish I knew how to upgrade back to the old iplayer.

Originally published on my old blog site.