Thursday 15 December 2011

Have Virgin Media fixed the BBC iPlayer issues for TiVo?

Bandwidth bottleneck on Virgin Media's network -
responsible for making the unmissable unplayable on TiVo?
A couple of Virgin Media employees have posted feedback on the Help & Support Forums (here and here) regarding the BBC iPlayer issues which have surfaced on TiVo since the 15.2 software update.

The second post reveals the presence of a bandwidth bottleneck which has since been removed from the network, plus an increase in bandwidth to deal with the iPlayer content which will (hopefully) be streaming to a TiVo near you without buffering and the other issues previously reported:

Apologies about the delay in replying to this thread.  We have been awaiting some information regarding an upgrade that has been done. As of today we should start seeing a reduction in the problems with BBC I Player.

Can we ask that you do a few tests in the next 24 hours and ask anyone who has not done so in the last 48 hours to do a reboot on their boxes and try the application again.
Please let us know if your still getting problems and we can check individual accounts.
Can you also please start your own individual posts so we can keep a track on each persons query.

Once again we apologise for the delay and thank you for your patience with us in this matter.
 ***********
Firstly sorry about the delay in posting about this, we've had some issues tracking the cause of this particular problem down. But after doing a lot of digging into the cause of this problem we've identified it and implemented a fix last night.
 
As of the 15.2 update we switched over to streaming all iPlayer content via the full iPlayer app and unfortunately we ran into a bandwidth bottleneck for some customers on one particular TiVo specific part of our network. The solution was to remove that bottleneck which we did last night and we've also made sure there is plenty of room for all of the iPlayer traffic that we're expecting over Christmas for everyone.
 
If you could confirm for us if you've seen an improvement or not we'd appreciate it.
Thanks

7 comments:

Jason (Admin) said...

Well....its working for me. iPlayer App was faster to load and I managed to watch 1st 10 minutes of Frozen Planet in HD without any issues.

Jaunty said...

Update - touch wood, seems ok so far today. A bit annoying that you still have to wait a while for iPlayer to load, but you can still go in from the TV Guide so not too much of a pain I guess

Unknown said...

I live in Belfast and am still having massive problems with BBC iPlayer on TiVo; it spends more time streaming than working!

Unknown said...

I meant to say buffering as opposed to streaming, or is it the same thing?!!

Unknown said...

Buffering very frequently. Stops and jumps back to earlier parts of the programme. Has stopped while posting this.

Unknown said...

Buffering quite a lot. Stopped 3 times already, and sometimes jumps back to earlier parts of the playback. Has now stopped again and gone back to start. Very annoying.

Jaunty said...

So it had been pretty good - but recently iPlayer is stalling and crashing out. Can't be too much demand at 2am can there? I wonder if it is connected t the recent update.

And so much for going "back in time " on your guide to just choose what you want to watch from catch up. Takes about an extra 238 clicks to get there!

My Blog List