BBC Sees Online Radio Break All Records

New figures from the BBC show internet radio proving more popular than ever, with 134 million hours of content being consumed in the last year – the equivalent of 15,345 years of continuous listening.

The BBC’s online Radio Player, allowing users to catch up on the last seven days’ broadcasts, notched up 100 million requests for programmes this year, representing over a third of all requests since its launch.

Elsewhere, the Corporation reported BBC Radio websites breaking all their previous records in October, with 7.7 million unique users viewing web pages and listening to 16.4 million hours of radio online.

Commenting on the new statistics, Simon Nelson, controller of BBC Radio & Music Interactive, said: “These incredible figures show that people really value the option of listening online and catching up with their favourite programmes if they miss them.”

Leading the way in internet listening in October was BBC Radio 4, which experienced a 25% increase in on demand listening hours. The station’s long-running radio soap, The Archers, received more than 700,000 listening requests, double the programme’s average monthly requests during 2004. The figures also show that since January there have been a massive 4.5 million requests for The Archers on demand.

Elsewhere, BBC 6 Music’s rebroadcast of John Peel’s 1967 BBC radio debut, as part of its 6 Music Plays It Again strand, became the network’s most requested programme on record, and contributed to a record 300,000 monthly on demand listening requests for the network.

Meanwhile, BBC Radio 1’s Keeping It Peel minisite generated three million page impressions in October and helped push the network’s unique users to over three million for the first time in any one month.

BBC: 020 8743 8000 www.bbc.co.uk