The BBC iPlayer continues to to expand its presence, and, for the first time, more users are taking advantage of the player on tablets than smartphones.
According to the BBC, more than 200,000 more iPlayer requests were made on tablets than smartphones in March 2013. The company claims that 30-percent of all requests are now made up of mobile devices. The BBC claims that 81 million requests were made to the iPlayer platform from mobile platforms in March 2013.
The launch of the BBC Live Restart feature has been a huge success with many customers using their iPlayer for TV on the same day as linear TV broadcasts. The BBC is also claiming a higher daytime and late-peak usage pattern via the iPlayer system. Typically, TV broadcasts peak around 9 pm with 26.8 million users while the iPlayer group of applications peak one hour later with an average of 495,000 viewers.
The number of mobile-based iPlayer requests have increased year-over-year from 15 percent to 30 percent while other devices have watched their shares drop. The BBC says iPlayer use on gaming consoles lost half of its viewership and now constitutes just three percent of all requests. Computer use of the iPlayer platform also fell from 59 percent to 47 percent. While computer marketshare for the iPlayer system has fallen the number of requests actually increased by 16 million for a total of 128 million requests.
The overall number of requests across all platforms is believed to have stayed constant with January’s 272 million requests.
Here is an examination of BBC iPlayer requests across all platforms since January 2009:
