iPlayer

[ozydave]

A few teachers have asked about having the iPlayer installed so started testing on my machine and it work fine until I try to download for later playback. I could not get to work so checked with our LEA and guess what they block the downloads, they say for security reasons. I’m in the BucksGfl authority area.
Any one else been blocked??
A great resource of educational material blocked by the local education authority.

Great!!!!

Cheers All

[ArchersIT]

Please read the fine print on iPlayer - when I looked you could only view downloaded programs for 7 days... which meant that it was not much use for the teachers here.

Jonathan

[steve_nfi]

We don't have it blocked. It is a great resource apart from the fact that it is only available for 7 days because of the DRM. You can keep it for up to 30 days but once you have viewed it, even if its for only a couple of seconds, then that is reduced to 7 days. Apparently there are ways to crack the DRM but haven't tried one as yet. Not sure of the legal implications.

[srochford]

A great resource of educational material blocked by the local education authority.

I obviously don't know why your LEA has blocked it but it's the sort of thing I would worry about as a network manager.

Many ISPs have seen huge traffic growth because of iPlayer; they can just buy more bandwidth and then pass the cost on in some way. LEAs are likely to find it much more difficult to increase bandwidth quickly (we're trying to get an upgrade at the moment and have been told we will have to wait at least 5 months!)

It's not always easy to say "that's a good idea, let's do it" - sometimes you have to say "that might be a good idea, but we don't have the infrastructure to cope with it"

[strawberry]

iplayer uses p2p to share and download it's files, every machine i've seen it on here it's slowed down and often these are the machines that "dont work".

[AJT1]

It's blocked through our LEA here to, although they can still stream programs from the website, just cant download to keep for 30 days.

Think the LEA don't want us to download programs as it shares them with other users in a p2p environment and like someone mentioned if you had 30 teachers all using it on there laptops in every school it would kill internet access!

[AJT1]

darn it you got there a minute before me! lol

[dave.81]

I've blocked the iplayer manager as it's p2p software and i refuse to knowingly allowing p2p running on my system.

Yes i allow staff to stream but no way they are using p2p software.