watch out for 4OD

host — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 05:00:28 GMT

Just a warning about 4OD

As you may or may not be aware, 4OD uses peer - to peer technology to deliver the service. This means that when you download a TV show or a film, rather than connecting to Channel 4's website your will be connecting to other peoples computers that have downloaded the same shows.

Now whilst this is fine and would have been the only way of providing this type of service (same as BBC). There are issues with 4OD.

For as long as you have a downloaded program stored on your hard drive and are connected to the internet 4OD will allow peoples to connect to your computer and download chunks of your download. There is no way of stopping this. If you do then 4 OD will not work.

Whilst there isn’t any privacy issues there are ISP issues. Most ISP's are currently traffic shaping which means that if they detect that you are using a peer to peer service they will cut bad on the bandwidth they provide you with. This will be temporary at first but will end up permanent.

I measured my bandwidth that had gone through my router the other day when I hadn’t used the internet at all and it was around 1GB in one day.

I would recommend that if you do download a program, watch it asap and then delete it. Or make a rule with your firewall that you can easily disable and enable quickly

PS The BBC allows you to turn the peer to peer part of the service off

Cheers

Is it just me............

jenga — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 11:14:43 GMT

or does 4OD seem to work better than ITV's Catch Up and the BBC iPlayer. I have a 512mb broadband connection and both the BBC iplayer and ITV's Catch Up stop about every 10 seconds.

4OD works perfectly

Cheers

beebiplayer 4OD

watch out for 4OD

Is it just me............