BBC iPlayer Reaches Five Million Unique Weekly Users

As the iPlayer celebrates its two years of existence on Christmas, the Beeb has revealed statistics about its revolutionary video on demand service, which indicated that 2009 has been the most successful year for iPlayer, by far, with ‘Top Gear’ declared as the most watched programme of the year.

The company said that the BBC iPlayer, which was earlier known as MyBBCPlayer, gets an average of 5 million unique users per week along with 80 million requests per month for BBC TV and Radio Programs. 

Expressing his satisfaction over iPlayer’s success, Eric Huggers, BBC’s director of future media and technology, said that "We'll be looking to increase the availability of the BBC iPlayer on new platforms and devices in coming months and are looking towards more success in 2010" 

The British broadcasting giant also mentioned that according to the stats, users who accessed iPlayer via Mac or PS3 preferred to watch comedy shows whereas Virgin Media and PC users preferred to watch drama shows like ‘Waking the Dead’ and ‘EastEnders’. 

BBC incidentally is on the verge of launching a new service in partnership with some of the major ISPs and telecoms of Britain which will allow users to access the internet and also watch regular TV via a single set-top box. The project has been named ‘Project Canvas’.