For Broadcast February 27, 2008

The naysayers used to claim that watching TV on a PC would never catch on. Well, they're eating fibre-optic humble pie now. Not only is iPlayer pulling in the punters with increasing velocity, it is also giving some shows an audience boost that the BBC is calling the "10% effect".

In the seven weeks since its official launch, the iPlayer delivered 17 million shows to people's PCs. Daily use grew from 300,000 per day in January to 400,000 in February to a record 660,000 on Sunday 24 February.

Catching up is clearly what people want to do and the iPlayer ticks the boxes: a limited second chance to see free, on-demand, licence-fee funded content.

Interestingly, the success of iPlayer is being greeted with a smile by Channel 4 and ITV who believe it validates the market for Kangaroo, the planned commercial online video service that is an ITV, Channel 4 and BBC Worldwide joint-venture.

Kangaroo will have a mix of advertising and paid-for content á la iTunes. But, to succeed, Kangaroo needs to be as easy to use as iPlayer. Among other things, this means it will have to allow streaming as well as downloading of video, because although old TV hands think that the quality of the viewing experience is primary to users, iPlayer streaming is beating the more cumbersome downloading by eight to one.

The strength of the audience uplift from iPlayer for some highly watched programmes has interesting implications, especially for niche channels. The audience for BBC2's Torchwood over its seven days on iPlayer is equivalent to 10% of its original TX audience. That 10% is likely to grow and the big question is whether iPlayer is cannibalising TV viewing or simply adding to it.

Would these iPlayer viewers have found Torchwood on TV? The BBC tells us that Lily Allen & Friends gets an extra 50,000 views in a day on iPlayer despite low audiences on BBC3. To me that is new or otherwise lost-to-TV audiences that iPlayer is capturing. And will iPlayer audiences eventually overtake linear audiences for some shows? The BBC's iPlayer champion Ashley Highfield doesn't say they will, but he doesn't say they won't either.