Weather helps iPlayer

iPlayer stats

As soon as the cold weather comes, you want to hide away - whether that's on your lunch-break at work, or your precious free time at the weekend - no one wants to brave the cold unless they have to. Normally the snow spells bad news for businesses, but for the BBC, the snow came as a blessing.

In fact, statistics show that as the snow came in and people went out less, the BBC saw records broken for TV and radio requests on BBCiPlayer in January. In total, there were 120 million requests across all platforms - both online platforms and devices, and BBC iPlayer on Virgin Media TV combined.

In particular, the week of 4 to 10 January saw a new record set for total requests (23.8 million) and radio requests (8 million), as people looked to catch up on TV they had missed over Christmas, such as the Doctor Who and Gavin and Stacey Christmas specials.

January saw BBC iPlayer attract an average of 3.2 million requests for programmes each day - the highest figure to date. To break the data down, it was a daily average of 2.2 million for TV programmes and an average of one million for radio programmes.

The top five BBC iPlayer shows in January 2010 were:

1. Top Gear Series 14, Episode 7 - 1,135,000 requests
2. Doctor Who: The End of Time Part 2 - 831,000 requests
3. Gavin and Stacey Series 3 Episode 6 - 700,000 requests
4. Mock the Week Series 8 Episode 1 - 658,000 requests
5. Tracy Beaker Returns Episode 1 - 565,000 requests

The figures show TV on the iPlayer was most popular between 8pm and 10pm in January - similar hours to TV peak time - while noon is the time most people listen to radio on theiPlayer, the British paper The Guardian states.

Jodie Humphries

Jodie Humphries graduated from Bath Spa University with a BA Hons in Creative Writing in 2008. She has worked for GDS Publishing for the digital group since July 2009. She has previous experience with writing for the web, running her own website since April 2007.

Related News:

CXO Exclusive: John Linwood, Chief Technology officer at the BBC |Switching channels - Lead Features - CXO Europe |BBC plans rejected |BBC not set to charge for online news

Like this article? Get the RSS feed: