“The Unmissable”. BBC iPlayers Success In Numbers

BBC’s iPlayer has been a great success since launching in July 2007, with an assured, well designed and functional product that has breathed innovation across the on demand media industry.

CXO, the business news site, met with the BBC’s Chief Technology Officer, John Linwood to find out more about the man behind the success and included a great info graphic depicting the sites traffic statistics since launch that you can see in full below.

The Question Time episode with BNP leader Nick Griffin topped the episode view charts with 928,000 requests.

85% of program visits are from computers which prompts the question of whether and how the BBC will develop mobile access further. At current there are optimised versions of the site for mobile devices like the iPhone, though in that case a WiFi connection is required which in turn restricts access.

It’s now available on 15 platforms and transfers 12.5gb worth of data per second and speaking to CXO, Linwood describes the obstacles that the popularity of the service can produce.

“One of the challenges we share with many other suppliers on the internet is that our user demand on the systems changes. For instance, if we have a very popular show on iPlayer and we get a huge speak in demand,” Linwood said.

“One example that is keeping me awake at night is the 2012 Olympics. We know that people will be accessing it from their PCs or their phones because it will be on in the daytime so the BBC is going to have to build up a huge amount of infrastructure to support that.”

The service has come under fire from ISPs due to the sheer amount bandwidth it uses and is a potential reason why the BBC have been held back in their efforts to increase mobile use, with 3G networks already struggling as it is.