bbc's iplayer (i suppose the british version of hulu?) is fucking awesome and one of the most visited websites for me. there's so much to watch and listen to, with no adverts whatsoever, plus they just introduced HD. it's a monster.

anyway, there's a really interesting interview with the guy in charge of the system over on cnet (read here). i thought fellow stat junkies might appreciate it.

excerpt..

iPlayer usage on the iPhone is very popular and it's growing strongly month on month. Here's a fun stat: iPlayer usage, for streaming, peaks about 10pm –- just a little later from TV. But interestingly, iPlayer on the iPhone peaks at about midnight. So people are clearly going to bed with their iPhone and watching in bed. And we also see on the weekends, there's a peak of Saturday and Sunday morning usage at about 8 to 10am in the morning on iPhone.

I think that at the moment, just for streaming, iPlayer uses about 60Gbps of bandwidth (that's about 7.5GB downloaded every second) in an evening peak. I think about 15Gbps for downloads, and about 1.5Gbps for iPhone. So overall on a particular peak day we may hit 100Gbps (about 12.5 gigabytes per second) although typically it'll be somewhat less than that. That turns out to be up to 7PB of data transfer a month.

Petabytes is a nice number. Some people know about gigabytes, some know about terabytes, and then there's petabytes.