BBC iPlayer and YouTube popularity soars in past year
Since the BBC’s iPlayer was launched last year, the popularity of web streaming has increased by 168%, according to web usage statistics from PlusNet’s 300,000 customers.
On Monday 30th June, between 9-10pm, 287GB of video content was watched, setting a new record for the company. Factors contributing to this may have included people catching up on other programmes following the Euro 2008 final.
The increased size and quality of video, and the more prominent plugging of radio, on the second version of iPlayer has led to increased bandwidth usage.
Overall, streaming accounted for nearly 10% of total web traffic. YouTube alone averages 6.5% of traffic, peaking at 16%.
This seems to have led to a reduction in the amount of peer-to-peer traffic, while gaming traffic increased by nearly 15% and email by around 10%.
Neil Armstrong, PlusNet’s products director, said, “It’s important to remember this isn’t all about iPlayer. YouTube drives significantly more traffic over the network than the BBC iPlayer does. What’s interesting is P2P appears to be shrinking – it’s too early to say for sure but this could be down to the increasing popularity of streaming, rather than downloading media.”
More information can be found at PlusNet’s community blog
Related posts: BBC planning iPlayer pre-booking service | BBC iPlayer 2.0 beta
