The BBC iPlayer is seemingly proving more popular than anyone could have predicted, with its success even prompting estimates for total UK online viewing to be scaled dramatically upwards.
When the iPlayer was originally announced and released in a public beta last year, the BBC were criticised for only offering the service to people using Windows based operating systems.
Public Dissatisfaction Worked
As a public broadcaster, with a duty to provide content for all, this is a valid complaint as it immediately stopped anyone using an Apple Mac or Linux based computer from accessing the service.
The BBC listened to the arguments, and took on board the views of the 16,000 people who felt angry enough to sign an online petition, and the service was relaunched over Christmas with Mac and Linux support, albeit offering just streaming content rather than downloads.
This, coupled with a marketing campaign over the holiday season has seen the iPlayer grow vastly in popularity, and the service saw over 1 million downloads in the first 20 days out of beta.
Online TV Growing Substantially In The UK
According to new data from research company Screen Digest, this has helped the UK rack up 800 million free to view programme views in 2007, and the estimates are that this is only going to grow.
Screen Digest has vastly scaled its estimates upwards based on the latest trends, and now predicts that 1.5 billion FTV videos would be called up by UK consumers in 2008, and then rise again to 2.8 billion by 2012.
4oD Criticised
The success of the iPlayer has however, according to the firm, highlighted problems inherent with other British broadcasters online television services, with Channel 4’s 4oD being particularly criticised.
4oD was cited as forcing on consumers “an unnecessary barrier to initial consumer adoption and hampers market growth”. This is because a program has to be downloaded to your PC before the service is accessible.
I tried 4oD, and through a combination of being wholly unimpressed by the interface, and finding my computer was continually connected to the service unless I made a point of switching it off, I uninstalled the player after just a few days.
The Future Of Television
Screen Digest senior analyst Arash Amel concluded the report by saying:
“Our long-term financial outlook of the UK online TV sector will now be dependant on the future development of convincing platform strategies by UK commercial broadcasters ITV, Channel 4 and Five, as well as new entrants such as Bebo, MySpace, YouTube and Joost.”
“It is expected that the success of the BBC’s iPlayer open web streaming model, and future ‘viral syndication’ strategies, will encourage UK commercial broadcasters to enter a long-term reassessment of how they deliver programming to users.”
Conclusions
The viral elements hinted at are the BBC’s plans for allowing content to be embedded on blogs and external websites, in a similar way to that which has seen YouTube become the most popular website in the world.
Innovations such as this, as well as exclusive deals such as the Six Nations rugby tournament being shown on iPlayer should ensure the service builds up momentum quickly.
Hopefully other broadcasters will learn from the mistakes and reparations made by the BBC, and be able to help online television viewing grow at an even faster rate than is being projected so far.
