December Boost for BBC iPlayer

January 6, 2009

Wallace & Gromit, most watched programme on iPlayer over Christmas The BBC’s iPlayer service had its most successful month ever in December thanks to an impressive line-up of programmes on the BBC over the Christmas period.

The BBC’s iPlayer service had its best month in December since it launched in 2007. The biggest month for the service was the result of an impressive line-up of programmes over the Christmas period across the BBC’s range of channels which resulted in BBC One dominating the Christmas Day and Boxing Day ratings, firmly beating its commercial rival ITV1. In December there were a huge 41 million requests to watch programmes via the iPlayer, compared to 35 million requests in November. There was 8 million such requests across the last week of December. Overall the total number of requests for programmes on the iPlayer stands at 271 million for 2008.

Since the iPlayer was launched in late 2008 it had proved to be a popular feature for the BBC with internet users taking up the advantage of watching a programme they had missed. Recently the BBC introduced “series stacking” to the iPlayer service which allowed viewers to watch all the episodes of a series beyond the usual one-month limit placed upon programmes on the iPlayer. Several weeks ago the BBC released a list of its most popular programmes on the iPlayer service for 2008 with Doctor Who, Merlin and Survivors all featuring in the list.

The Top 20 programmes on BBC iPlayer during this time were:

New Wallace & Gromit 1 Wallace And Gromit: A Matter Of Loaf And Death