The BBC's iPlayer now exceeds 160 million requests per month

The on-demand television service of the British BBC has already reached 160 million monthly requests, of these streams, about 35 million correspond to radio programs. On the other hand, BBC has just opened its service to third-party channels such as ITV, Channel 4, S4C or Five.

Available on practically all platforms such as PC, Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Symbian or even consoles such as PlayStation 3 or Wii and some pay television platforms, iPlayer, the on-demand television service of the British BBC, does not stop growing. In the month of January alone, iPlayer reached 160 million requests. Of them, about 35 million correspond to radio content.

Now, BBC has taken a new step, giving free rein to the exchange of data from third-party channels such as ITV, Channel 4, S4C or Five, which will allow viewing the programming of these “competition” channels on BBC iPlayer.

Along these lines, the British public broadcaster has revealed its intention to not use iPlayer as an on-demand content aggregator, but as a unified television platform that brings together the main channels with both live and on-demand programming.

That is to say, BBC's approach is to turn iPlayer into a great content search engine open to any VOD provider rather than a media pool. In fact, Sky, for example, has recently been incorporating iPlayer into its online version.