More people appear to be listening to less BBC Radio through BBC iPlayer.
Within one week in March, average weekly minutes for radio listened to via BBC iPlayer crashed from a record of over 200 per user to about 140 minutes, and have barely recovered.
UK Radio Player, a partnership between commercial broadcasters Global Radio, GMG Radio and Absolute Radio, plus commercial radio’s RadioCentre trade body, launched in the same week the crash happened. It aggregates several broadcasters’ channels through a standardised player console.
“We are still investigating the dip in radio durations in March, which may be due to stats measurement problems,” the BBC says in its monthly iPlayer press pack.
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It could well be a statistical anomaly caused when the BBC started making its streams available through Radio Player’s pop-up console.
The popularity of individual radio programmes is still increasing. In August, iPlayer served a record 40 million radio requests to users, an average of 1.3 million per day, to a record-equalling 400,000 daily users on average.