Digital TV News

Tablet requests for iPlayer hit all-time high

Monday 17 October, 2011

By Helen Thomas

iPlayer requests from tablets have reached an all-time high, despite a slight drop in the overall total of requests

iPlayer received a total of 153 million TV and radio programme requests last month.

Although the total figure was down slightly from the previous month, requests via newer devices continued to grow. Tablets requests in particular saw a significant increase, rising from 4 million in August, to an all-time high of 4.6 million last month.

Doctor Who, Outnumbered and Waterloo Road were this month’s most requested titles, but a variety of genres featured in the top 20 TV requests including comedy, drama, factual and sports.

The Chris Moyles Show, The News Quiz and 5 Live Sport topped the request list for radio.

With the number of Brits who own a tablet computer at 3.6 million and growing, the amount of people who use these devices to stream iPlayer programmes looks set to continue to rise.

However, while tablets make streaming TV and radio any time, any place even easier, it adds to users’ data consumption totals via their broadband connection or mobile network. This could send them sailing past their data usage limits, which could see their service throttled or extra charges added to their bill.

This can be avoided by checking with your provider what, if any, download limits you may be subject to.