At work I have a 100Mbps of uncontended bandwidth to play with. It does me. I thought I’d watch some sport this afternoon, in between stuff. This was partly because I drew Chile in the office sweepstake – they are playing Switzerland as I write – and partly because I’m taking one of my lads to Wimbledon on Thursday – centre court – keep an eye out for me in the crowd.
Both sports are being covered on BBC iPlayer this afternoon. I can of course watch both at the same time – and that’s despite being a bloke (or is it because of it?) – because I have two screens at my desk.
The quality is pretty good as an embedded pane though the full screen isn’t perfect for the footy – it’s actually better for the tennis. This must presumably be due to load on the iPlayer servers with the two major events happening at the same time. The football has more moving on the screen. so needs more bandwidth. I am not using broadband so there should be no local exchange congestion to worry about.
One reply on “Sport streaming on the internet this afternoon #worldcup #wimbledon”
Good point about how “football has more moving on the screen, so needs more bandwidth”, which is something that no a lot of people understand. Modern video codec’s are quite clever and only display areas of a frame that actually change, hence a static camera overlooking 90% of the court green is likely to have a lower bit rate with only specific parts of the image needing to change.
Of course crowds and people are a nightmare for codec’s, which is why you always get huge pixilation and ghosting around them since they’re rarely sitting statically. In theory if the BBC iPlayer service got too overloaded then I guess they could just use a camera with the least crowd visibility 🙂 .
But that would be too clever hehe.