BBC iPlayer: Half a million a day and rising

For a start, it must be remembered that iPlayer doesn’t just give access to programmes for seven days. Any show that receives a repeat showing renews the ‘window’ for iPlayer viewing. So if a programme airs first on BBC2 and is repeated a week later on BBC3, or vice versa, that’s potentially fourteen days of iPlayer availability.

In the overall top 10, both Doctor Who, Louis Theroux and the first episode of Torchwood would have been available for fourteen days within the reporting period. The other two Torchwood episodes would have been available for eight days, and I suspect that Top Gear may similarly have been available for more than seven days.

Which makes the achievement of Mistresses, each episode of which was only broadcast once and thus would only have been online for seven days, all the more impressive — especially as it’s not the sort of genre-based show with a dedicated internet fanbase. And we shouldn’t dismiss the appearance of Ashes to Ashes in there either. While that’s a sci-fi/fantasy show (and is listed as such in the revamped iPlayer’s new subcategory pages) and had a large amount of interest from its status as a Life on Mars spin-off, it premiered on 7 February, which would mean that in the period that chart covers, it would only have been available for five days.

So what of the programmes that don’t show up in that overall chart? EastEnders is, I’m told, regularly in the top 5 of the day’s iPlayer downloads. But with four episodes a week, people tend not to view older episodes if there’s a newer one already available, so the weekly aggregate viewing figures for each episode are less than for programmes that air once a week.

Of the other programmes, 50% of all requests are for programmes which don’t trouble the iPlayer Top 50 at all, which implies that the iPlayer is going to have a dramatic impact on the reach for much of the BBC’s less heralded output. And today, the BBC has revamped its iPlayer pages to include links to the most recently added shows, those with less than six hours of viewing remaining as well as a constantly updated chart of the most popular shows be streaming.

Uptake of iPlayer is bound to carry on increasing. Personally, my favourite of all the forthcoming developments (even more than the fabled downloading facility for Macs, which is promised for later this year) will be the iPhone/iPod Touch version, due to go live within the next few weeks. This will combine a user interface similar, if not identical, to the standard website with high quality H264-encoded videos, all streamed over a wireless broadband connection.

Future plans? Ashley Highfield did talk about ‘pre-downloading’ as being a possibility: if you bookmark a series as being of interest (something that’s definitely coming), it might be possible to download new episodes overnight beforehand, where they’d be locked on your PC until the broadcast episode airs. This could be especially useful as and when the service expands to allow HD quality downloads. Until then, the size and picture quality of the iPlayer picture will gradually increase as the BBC’s infrastructure improves.

So over the first couple of months, iPlayer has become a huge success — and it looks like it’ll carry on in the same vein in the months to come, too.