Mobile users drive iPlayer request increase in January 2016


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Editor

| 04 March 2016




New Year’s Day celebrations carried over into increased BBC iPlayer requests in January 2016.



Overall for the month, the TV and radio streaming and on-demand service attracted 315 million TV and radio requests, a 2% increase of month-on-month.

According to the data from BBC iStats, January 2016 produced 250 million TV requests with an average of 18.4 million unique browsers per week to BBC iPlayer for both TV and BBC iPlayer Radio. Reach to TV pages was stable month-on-month.

From an overall platform perspective, request increases were seen across all devices, most notably on mobile devices. Requests on tablets and connected TV devices both grew month-on-month compared with December 2015, but this growth was balanced out by slight decreases in requests on mobile devices, tablets and games consoles, and the profile of devices was broadly consistent with December. The percentage of on-demand requests has remained stable at 92%, 8% of TV requests were for live TV viewing in January.

In terms of specific content requests, the eagerly-awaited One-off episode Sherlock The Abominable Bride was by far the most popular TV title in January, delivering over 2.3 million requests. Other New Year's Day episodes proved particularly popular, with EastEnders and Billionaire Boy both also available on BBC iPlayer from that day while platform-exclusive comedy-drama film The Rack Pack made it into the top 20 most requested titles in January, in its first two weeks of availability, drawing nearly a million requests in total.