t’s been a busy month for the BBC’s iPlayer service with traffic stats and new partnership deals being announced at every turn. The re-launch of the iPlayer on Christmas Day certainly seems to have certainly been successful with the corporation reporting 17m online programme views in the first seven weeks according to The Guardian. Over […]
t’s been a busy month for the BBC’s iPlayer service with traffic stats and new partnership deals being announced at every turn. The re-launch of the iPlayer on Christmas Day certainly seems to have certainly been successful with the corporation reporting 17m online programme views in the first seven weeks according to The Guardian. Over 2.2m people used the service in January accessing an average of five shows per user. The BBC is now serving over 500,000 shows per day to an average 1.3m unique users a week. In total they provided 11m TV downloads and 15.9m radio streams during January. Traffic has also risen for the main bbc.co.uk website, up 29% year-on-year to reach 20m unique users per week during January.
The BBC has also announced syndication deals with Yahoo!, MSN and Blinkx which will allow the sites to host clips from BBC TV shows which will links back to full versions available through iPlayer. By providing content through various partners the BBC will clearly increase the reach of its content while still encouraging viewers to visit the iPlayer website to view full versions of programmes. The Blinkx deal in particular is interesting as Blinkx will themselves catalogue and index all content currently available through the iPlayer service.
Finally BBC Worldwide has revealed a rumoured partnership with Apple to sell BBC shows via iTunes. Programmes will be released on iTunes after they have been removed from the iPlayer service and downloads will cost £1.89 each.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk, 20/02/2008
BBC iPlayer: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer
