Thatcher funeral fuels live iPlayer requests
The funeral of Baroness Thatcher was the second most requested live TV programme ever on BBC iPlayer with just over 800,000 live streams, second to the London Olympics.
There were 257 million BBC iPlayer requests overall in April, slightly lower than the last couple of months, which the BBC says is most likely due to the impact of the Easter holidays and lighter evenings as British summer time begins.
Average daily requests remained high at 7.9 million, with weekly requests peaking at 57 million in the second and third weeks of the month.
Tablet and smartphone requests were fractionally lower than the results for March – 38 million and 37 million, respectively – however accounted for a healthy 30% of all requests across TV and radio (75 million).
iPlayer consumption via connected TVs appears to have hit a plateau in terms of consumption, accounting for 2% of all requests since September 2012, however it has risen marginally over the month from five million to six million.
The Voice UK and Doctor Who had a strong April, with a cumulative 7.8 and 7.5 million live and catch-up requests across the entire month, respectively. The first episode of new BBC One drama The Village also performed well, with over one million requests.
Radio saw a record-breaking 74 million requests (up 3% period on period) – 84% of which were for live listening. For radio, BBC iPlayer is used far more in daytime than traditional radio listening, which peaks at breakfast-time.