One Love Manchester and Glastonbury bring live viewers to BBC iPlayer
David Farnor | On 25, Jul 2017
Big events such as the One Love Manchester benefit concert, the general election and Glastonbury festival made June a big month for live viewing on BBC iPlayer.
Over one-fifth (21 per cent) of the requests to BBC iPlayer in June were for live TV viewing, the highest level for any month since the Olympics in August last year.
One Love Manchester was the most popular programme of the month, with over 2 million requests for the concert. The initial hours of the BBC’s general election coverage saw the second highest level of requests in June, with 1.3 million requests.
The Glastonbury festival also drove a large proportion of live viewing, with more than 4.5m requests for live streams on BBC iPlayer and the BBC’s Glastonbury website throughout the weekend.
June saw 256 million requests to BBC iPlayer in total, a 12 per cent increase on the same month in 2016. Outside of live viewing, Sean Bean drama Broken was the best performing show, with over 1.2 million requests. New drama Paula also performed well, with 992,000 requests, and the return of Poldark inevitably proved popular, with over 934,000 requests.
White Gold Season 1 premiered with 756,000 requests, kicking off a surge in views for the show, which was released as a full box set on BBC iPlayer and has already been renewed for a second season. BBC Three also made a notable appearance in iPlayer’s top 20 most-watched episodes, with Murdered for Being Different drawing just over half a million requests.