Who is stealing your bandwidth?

You may find that Channel 4 and the BBC are “stealing” your bandwidth without you realising it. How?

You install the BBC iPlayer software, the Channel 4 equivalent 4OD or Sky by Broadband.

The software installs among other things a Peer To Peer (P2P) file sharing application (called KService.exe) from a company called Kontiki.

Channel4 has this to say in it's Terms and Conditions: 4oD uses peer to peer ("P2P") technology. This allows content to be transferred directly from the computers of users of the Service (rather than through a website or directory). If you download Content to your computer, during the Licence Period, we may upload this from your computer (using part of your upstream bandwidth) for the purpose of transferring Content to other users of the Service. Please contact your Internet Service Provider ("ISP") if you have any queries on this.

Sky says even less in its Terms and Conditions
If you download and save content to your computer system (a "File"), during the license period for the relevant File, we may upload parcels of content from the File from your computer system for the purpose of transferring Files to other users of the Service.

Technical digression: The downloaded video files are so large that the load on the BBC/Channel 4/Sky servers would be too great to be sustainable, if they were the only source of the files, so using a P2P application to spread the files across the internet is actually a pretty reasonable proposition. The idea is that the load is spread across many computers each contributing a part of their bandwidth.

It isn’t such a great idea because KService is left running all of the time that your computer is turned on. There is no way to control when it runs or how much bandwidth it is taking and it isn’t easy to get rid of.

Ok. There are two main reasons to be concerned:

You will think that your broadband is much worse than it actually is because of the bandwidth being used by KService.exe
Many Internet Service Providers have what is termed a “Fair Use Policy”. You can be penalised or even have your connection terminated if the ISP feels like it.

This hurts people with small download limits worst of all. There is a solution however.

Someone by the name of Murad James has written a little computer program which he talks about in this blog post: "Do you use iPlayer or 4oD to download TV programs?" which can be used to control KService when used by the BBC, Channel 4 and Sky download services. The program itself can be downloaded from here: TVODMonitorInstaller.zip.

For those interested in the technical detail, well that's me and maybe one or two others, somone called Strix has a fasinating discussion of the detail of the BBC iPlayer: The BBC iPlayer

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