Tablet requests for iPlayer surpass smartphones for first time ever

The new BBC iPlayer performance results for March reveals the tablet to be the second most popular medium in which people request to watch iPlayer on, ahead of the smartphone for the first time ever.

In March 2013, there were 272 million BBC iPlayer requests, equalling the record breaking figures that the corporation saw in January.

Of these, 41 million requests (15%) were from tablets, and 40 million from smartphones, both accounting for 30% of all iPlayer TV and radio requests.

Connected TV requests remained stable at 5 million (2%), seeing no change since January.

Unsurprisingly, computers remain the most popular device that people watch iPlayer on and make up for almost half of all iPlayer requests, increasing from 124 million in February to 128 million in March. Computers have seen a year-on-year increase of 16 million.

With a month-on-month increase of 4%, total monthly requests for iPlayer reached a record 250 million, driven by increases to both TV and radio – up 3% and 7%, respectively.

Average daily requests were down by 500,000 compared with February’s requests, with weekly requests also seeing a month-on-month decline – down 3 million.

Traditional TV viewing is still much higher than iPlayer use, with TV peaking around 9pm at an average of 26.8 million, whilst iPlayer requests peaked approximately one hour later, hitting figures just short of 500,000.

Connected Consumer subscribers can view the trend on iPlayer usage from January 2009 to March 2013 in the Channel Viewing section.