The BBC’s online portal, iPlayer, cannot be considered anything other than a success. During its development, the corporation was criticised for developing a bespoke site, rather than buying one off the shelf – but this criticism went strangely quiet after the site launched, as its superiority to its commercial equivalents soon became obvious. Internally, the BBC had hoped for 500,000 users within the site’s first six months; iPlayer received nearly four million requests for downloads or streams in its first three weeks.
11 years on, usage numbers continue to grow, so reliably that them doing so has simply stopped being noted; while research by YouGov repeatedly shows the service to be considered easier to use and more reliable than commercial or public sector equivalent.
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