Olympics opening ceremony gets record iPlayer hits

Published on 25/01/2013 02:08

The opening of the Olympics was the most popular show on the BBC’s iPlayer last year, with about 3.3 million requests.

Danny Boyle’s spectacular event, which featured appearances by stars including Bradley Wiggins, Kenneth Branagh and Daniel Craig, got half a million more requests than the second most popular show – an episode of Top Gear.

Other popular shows included episodes of Sherlock and Doctor Who which had more than two million requests.

The top three radio programmes were Jay-Z live at Radio 1’s Hackney Weekend, Wallace and Gromit at the Proms 2012 and Rihanna live at Hackney.

The figures show more people are using the service on their phones and tablet computers.

Daniel Danker, general manager of programmes and on-demand, said: “2012 was a ground-breaking year for BBC iPlayer with a record 2.32 billion requests for programmes across over 650 platforms.”