Dramas including The Responder, Peaky Blinders, David Attenborough’s The Green Planet and the return of The Apprentice helped drive BBC iPlayer to its best-ever quarter, with programmes streamed 1.83 billion times between January and March.
According to figures released by the BBC, it had the highest weekly reach of any provider during the first quarter of 2022 – with millions tuning in to watch programmes on broadcast TV as well as record-breaking viewing on iPlayer.
Latest iPlayer data shows:
- Viewers streamed programmes a record 1.83 billion times in the first three months of the year, 100 million more times than in the same period last year
- Jamie Dornan’s Australian outback mystery series The Tourist provided the year’s most popular individual episode so far, with the first episode streamed 6.1 million times, and the boxset streamed 32 million times
- New dramas The Responder (5.2m streams), This is Going to Hurt (4m streams), Four Lives (3.8m streams), The Rules of the Game (3.5m streams) and Chloe (3.2m streams) also make the top ten episodes per series of the quarter
- Lord Sugar’s return in The Apprentice is the year’s biggest boxset so far, streamed 33 million times, with Peaky Blinders (30m streams), the Winter Olympics (29m streams), and Killing Eve (15m streams) also making the top 10.
The record start to 2022 follows iPlayer’s best year ever – with 6.5 billion programmes streamed in 2021, up 12 per cent on 2020.
Dan McGolpin, director of BBC iPlayer, said: “BBC iPlayer is more popular than ever in 2022 and the rollout of a more modern look has helped the service to notch-up its best ever quarter across the first three months.”
