BBC iPlayer has failed to translate brand awareness into an awareness of the benefits of using of the service.
In the view of David Price, head of BBC iPlayer, this is one of the many challenges it now faces and the iPlayer experience has to be made simpler for a mainstream audience and at the same time continue to be a delight to those who have used it for years.
Price said that iPlayer is now used by 16 million people weekly, equivalent to a quarter of the UK’s population, with the service being available on 650 types of devices.
However, this still left 75% of the population to be targeted by the service, whose strategy is ‘beyond the PC, beyond catch-up and beyond the tech-savvy’.
iPlayer’s programme requests amounted to 2.3 billion in 2012, a 46% increase year-on-year, with an interesting trend being that its usage on tablets (36% of the total was on mobiles and tablets in March this year, compared to only 3% on connected TVs) is growing on devices such as the Kindle Fire and Nexus 7, rather than just the iPad.
Price also said that 40% of iPlayer PC users now employ the restart feature when watching live content.