Thatcher’s funeral second most-watched iPlayer programme

Baroness Thatcher’s funeral was the second ever most-requested live TV broadcast on the BBC’s iPlayer VOD service, topped only by last summer’s Olympics coverage.  

In its latest set of monthly iPlayer stats, the BBC said that 986,000 iPlayer requests were logged for Thatcher’s funeral, 832,000 of which were for the BBC’s live broadcast.

However, over the full month of April, the BBC received 257 million iPlayer requests, down slightly on the previous three months, which the corporation attributed to the “impact of the Easter holidays and lighter evenings as British summer time began.”

Average daily programme requests also decreased slightly in April, but were still strong at an average 7.9 million per day. This compares to 8.1 million in March and a record 8.6 million in February. Weekly requests peaked at 57 million in the second and third weeks of April.

In terms of device breakdown, the programme requests from tablets continued to outnumber requests from mobiles by 400,000. Together, mobile and tablet requests accounted for 30% of overall requests at 75 million programme streams. PC still accounted for most at 122 million requests in the month.

“The profile of BBC iPlayer users has evened out over time in terms of male/female ratio, but remains strongly under-55 in terms of age, which is younger than the typical TV viewer or radio listener’s profile – although more in line with home broadband users,” the BBC said.