Are VirgnMedia traffic shaping Flash video streaming?

I've noticed over the past few days that streaming any videos has become difficult at best and impossible at worst.

Was trying to catch up on a few things I missed on TV so hopped over to 4oD to watch a show. The ads spluttered, stopped and buffered every few secs. Hoping this was a minor issue I persevered to the main show..... 20+ seconds of buffering for 3 seconds of play time, totally unwatchable.

Exasperated I went to the BBC Iplayer and got a slightly better though still disappointing result, lots of buffering. So I tried the other TV catchup sites (itvplayer, 5 on Demand) that use flash to stream and got the same result.

Did the usual checks... Flash player was up-to-date, downloading speed was fine , speedtests were ok.

I dont have the best connection speed (1.8Mbps - 2.5Mbps on a normal day) but when streaming video it never streams above 500Kbps making most sites unwatchable (And I mean never.... tried streaming a video at 2am and had the same problems).

This has only been the case in the last few days and I'm wondering if its just me or if others have noticed it?

//Runey

P.S. Confirmed the streaming speed the BBC Iplayer diagnostic tool
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/diagnostics#results

VM DSL is notorious for traffic shaping.

This test should give you a good idea if traffic shaping is being applied to the Iplayer stream.

Hi

I get the same thing and think virgin are interfering with iplayer.

what does the data from the BBC speedtest tell you from the 3 speeds it gives?

my test showed first run same as my broadband speeed but the ofthe two runs were a quarter of that

I'm not with Virgin but for comparison these are my results:

Download 18258
Test 1 10716
Test 2 17261
Test 3 17459

I pay extra to (In theory) have traffic shaping removed. Don't know what other factors may affect the streaming speed?