Record breaking growth on iPlayer and BBC Sounds comes to a crescendo in the festive fortnight

Between 29 December and 3 January, the BBC record 245 million streams, up 16% on the same ‘festive fortnight’ at the end of 2019. A lot of this was new shows, including Black Narcissus and The Serpent, as well as Eastenders and Call the Midwife. New Years Day was busiest with 21.2 million streams and 7.93 million unique browsers (ie separate devices or people with multiple browsers on the same device).

BBC Sounds also broke records with 45 million plays in the same period breaking the 2019/20 figure by a massive 36%. Amongst the most popular was Cipher with Anya Chalotra and Chance Perdomo.

There’s too much information to do justice to in this one news-piece, and the full press release makes an interesting read. Of interest to Cutbox visitors will be Revolution of the Daleks reaching 941,000 streams. In comparison, Eastenders topped the list with 1,524,000 views of its Christmas Day episode, beating Call the Midwife, which scored 1,487,000. The final episode of His Dark Materials series 2 gained a healthy 643,000 views, coming in at 15th on the list.

Across the whole fortnight, Eastenders was most popular, with the series netting 13,852,000 streams across all episodes.