The BBC’s iPlayer on demand service continues to expand rapidly. New figures available today show that an average of 1.4 million people a week accessed the service during April. All told, over 75 million requests to stream or download programmes have been received since the service’s official launch at Christmas.
On average, the iPlayer site received just under 700,000 requests a day in April. That’s much less than the number of people who watch a regular BBC1 scheduled broadcast, of course, but there’s every sign that the Corporation’s digital channel commissions are getting a much broader audience through the service. Gavin and Stacey, for example, was viewed online by approximately a quarter of a million people, compared to a broadcast ‘reach’ of three million.
In terms of usage by age, take-up seems fairly good across the board. That the largest share of users comes in the under-35s category is no surprise, but it’s heartening to see that a fifth of all usage comes from people aged 55 and over. It certainly helps that iPlayer’s streaming incarnation is incredibly easy to use: being a Mac user I haven’t yet been able to experience the downloadable version available to Windows users, but it would be hard to match the simplicity of going to a web page and pressing ‘play’.
Speaking of Mac users, we make up 10% of all iPlayer users, compared to the dominant 85% of people using Windows PCs (no word on how their usage splits between streaming and downloads). The iPhone and iPod Touch, both of which can access a customised version of the website optimised for the handheld devices, have a strong showing too. While the Nintendo Wii has enough users to just creep onto the graph, in my experience the experience of selecting videos and then getting them to play is not a pleasant one, and in its current form I can’t see Wii usage increasing much.
When looking at iPlayer usage around the clock, there’s still a noticeable peak in the evenings that roughly corresponds to the same increase in broadcast viewing. However, it’s less pronounced, suggesting that there’s a substantial number of iPlayer users who watch during the day. Given that The Apprentice has become one of the top programmes on the platform, I wonder how many of them are taking sneaky peeks while at work?
All graphs kindly supplied by the BBC
Bet you're right about the watching at work. Which is the top sciving site ?