Can anyone enlighten me on how much of my download allowance iplayer uses.

I’m reading this

It says the standard option streams at 800kbps, and if you switch to the bigger window it ups to 1500kbps. A ‘low bandwidth’ option of 500kbps is also available.

Does switching to fullscreen stream at 1500kbps.

How do I work out how much an hours viewing uses?

no-one?

I was pondering a similar question myself.

(Can I live with a 10mb limit, or should I go for 40mb…I wonder how much iPlayer uses).

Have you tried downloading an iPlayer program? Does it tell you the file size?

Have a look under the download tab and it’ll tell you how big the file is. Is that what you are after?

Edit. A normal quality hour program is about 600mb.
You get better quality streaming with a 40mb package future proofing and all that.

if you were to download programs from the iplayer they would likely see files approximately 55mb/hour for radio and 250mb/hour for video (that would be radio1 and BBC2), HD content is obviously bigger, I seem to remember about x4 but I maybe wrong.

I can see download sizes (e.g. current episode of Spooks is a 636MB download) but I’m on about streaming. Was wondering if someone could enlighten me on the maths.

Edit:
Just found this converter
Which says 1500kbps comes in at 644 MB per hour

Does this mean streaming iPlayer in anything other than the tiddly window set to ‘low bandwidth’ means it uses as much of your download allowance as actually downloading the file?

Yes…maybe…if no one on here is definitive it might be worth e-mail Aunty.

TBH you’re much better off with an ‘unlimited’ package, as the limited download ones aren’t much cop for owt more than a few emails and a bit of surfing. I can download several gigabytes of stuff per day. I’ll often download a bunch of iPlayer programmes during the day to watch that evening or another time. Not having to worry about exceeding your allowance (and then incurring heavy fees) is worth the extra few quid a month.