BBC celebrates ‘best ever’ iPlayer performance

New Year’s Day was the best day ever for the iPlayer with 11 million TV and radio programme requests lodged on the BBC’s catch-up service as viewers caught up on the UK pubcaster’s line-up of festive programming.

That compares with 8.1 million requests on New Year’s Day 2013 and equates to a 35% year-on-year increase in programme requests.

iPlayer boss Dan Taylor revealed the stats in a blog post. He went on to note that Doctor Who was the single most requested programme with almost two million requests, ahead of soap opera Eastenders, the Mrs Brown’s Boys Christmas Special, Call the Midwife Christmas Special and kids and family drama Gangsta Granny.

The other notable trend in iPlayer usage over the Christmas and New Year period was the increase in viewing over connected tablet devices. Having proved a popular gift on Christmas Day, iPlayer viewing on tablets overtook that of computer viewing for the first time ever on December 26. Almost a million consumers downloaded the iPlayer tablet app over the holiday season.

There was also an uptick in iPlayer usage on connected TVs and mobile devices although these trailed tablets and computers.

Across 2013, Taylor said that there were 102 million requests for TV and radio programmes (80 million of the total were for TV).