@Chris Williams

"The BBC's Flash-based streaming service has gifted a massive [14x] traffic boost to the iPlayer site since it went live in mid-December, independent figures have revealed."

So you're seriously claiming that the streaming version being launched led to the traffic to the iPlayer website going up by 14x??

Why do you think TV advertising campaigns cost millions and millions of pounds? It's because TV advertising campaigns multiply sales - it is not an excuse for the advertisers to donate money to ITV et al. The spike in traffic to the iPlayer website will have been almost completely due to the TV advertising blitz over Xmas. If the streaming version had launched before Xmas and there had been no TV adverts the traffic to the iPlayer website would have hardly gone up at all.

Also, do you actually use the streaming version of the iPlayer? I've found that it buffers so badly that it's unusable at peak times. And there's nothing wrong with my Internet connection, because to check that it's okay when the iPlayer is unusable I've tried downloading from a fast server and it manages to download at about 6 to 7 Mbps.

"We've written at length on why the desktop client is a non-starter for the mass market. With the case for streaming now proven, the BBC would do well to silence the interoperablity grumbles for good by killing it off."

So you think it's a good idea to kill off the download version that provides higher picture and audio quality than the streaming version, works perfectly well, by definition has no problems with buffering, will scale well as more people use the iPlayer, and is likely to carry HD content in future? And in its place you want the BBC to only use a streaming version that suffers horrendously from buffering problems, scales abysmally due to it using unicasting (and cannot use multicasting), provides poor picture and audio quality and will probably be able to carry HD content by about 2046 once the BBC can afford the Internet bandwidth required? Good call.