Just removed the BBCi Player i downloaded the other week after finding that its actually running a P2P engine that there was no mention of... Result was huge amounts of traffic, i.e. other people downloading Top gear and other programs I had downloaded from me... for three weeks my pc has been sat doing this whislt I was in Germany!
Not a happy lad at the min, took me 10 mins to work out what it was, thought i had a virus, ran an IP trace to find mulitple UDP connections on port 1948 with lots of traffic, couldn't work out what this was at first, bot pinned the pid down to a program called Kontiki installed as the BBCi player

Thought the BBC would have thought of a better idea than that, me knowing what the BBC network security is like...

Anyhow its now binned...
so if you have a ISP thats whatching your bandwidth used then DO NOT USE THE BBCi PLAYER!

 

I'd consider posting your findings to The Register, they'll love that.

Thankfully as I'm a Mac user and the BBC loves brown nosing MS and thus using their lovely DRM stuff, I can't use iPlayer.

I've just found this which does make reference to the TOS stating that it'll install a P2P app, plus it does mention the option can be turned off in the player. Shame they aren't a little more upfront about this though.

 

I think Sky use the same technique for their TVIP offering. Means that they don't have to provide all the stupidly fast network connections to download the programs from nor pay for all that bandwidth.

 

I don't see an issue with a P2P element to help others get the programs.

Most ISPs won't even monitor your upload amount in a month anyway.

 

Edited for correctness