Luke Bradley-Jones, director of TV products at Sky, said "We’re delighted to have partnered with the BBC to bring the best of the BBC on demand to Sky customers. According to the BBC it had nearly 200 million requests for programmes in September alone. The service enables viewers to browse on-demand menus, look up content by channel, day and genre and download it automatically to a Sky+ box.īBC iPlayer is already available on more than 650 platforms and devices, including Virgin Media, YouView and BT Vision. Sky+HD customers will be able to catch up with TV shows from all the terrestrial broadcasters by the end of the year, after 4oD signs up. You’ll have to dive into the app’s settings if you want that switched on.BBC iPlayer has been integrated into the Sky electronic programme guide (EPG), joining ITV and Channel 5 programming already available on the service.
The BBC iPlayer app does allow you to download shows on mobile data too, but that isn’t enabled by default. Obviously, you can download shows over Wi-Fi for later viewing, so that would be a much better option if you’re on a mobile plan with a tight data limit. It looked to be the same quality as the show I streamed. I downloaded that same 30-minute episode of Here We Go for offline viewing, and that took up 375MB of storage on my device.
So, it is possible that some streaming sessions will use less data than I observed. In my tests, the bitrate looked adaptive, which means the quality of the video is automatically altered depending on the available mobile data bandwidth.
It’s also worth noting that (on Android, at least) I couldn’t find any way of adjusting the streaming quality, so you’re pretty much stuck with whichever rate the iPlayer app decides. Therefore, be careful if you’re on a mobile data plan with a tight data cap, because you could find that watching shows on iPlayer whilst you’re out and about eats through a lot more data than you might expect. In that short time, it used 411MB of data, which is around four times as much data as the BBC website suggested. I streamed a 30-minute episode of Here We Go over a 4G connection using the BBC iPlayer app for Android.
In my tests, that is a woeful underestimate. On that, it claims that:Īn hour-long TV programme will typically use 225MB of data. The BBC has a support page for watching BBC iPlayer on mobile data. How much data does iPlayer use? It’s more than the BBC claims, if my tests are anything to go by. The BBC iPlayer is a great service for either catching up on programmes or watching live BBC channels, but if you’re watching via mobile data you may need to keep an eye on how much data it’s chomping through.
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