BBC iPlayer steams ahead with internet usage

January 11, 2008 — Damien

Comment: Internet traffic to the iPlayer site is growing rapidly supported by outside advertising posterboards as well as reminders during TV advertising. However a lot of internet traffic seems to be sucked up by their kservices P2P network which aims to share the downloaded files with other iPlayer users.

UK Internet traffic to the BBC’s iPlayer website increased 14-fold between the week ending 8 December 2007 and the week ending 5 January. The online catch-up TV service ranked as the 80th most visited website in the UK for the week ending 5 January 2008, having peaked at number 62 on New Year’s Day.

The BBC heavily promoted iPlayer on TV and in the press over the Christmas period and it seems to have paid off. Searches for ‘iPlayer’ increased 15-fold over the last month, and one fifth of the site’s traffic came from search engines last week. UK TV viewers are also finding iPlayer when searching for their favourite BBC programs online: ‘eastenders’ was the most popular non-navigational search term sending traffic to the site over the last month. Other popular program searches sending traffic to the site were ‘live at the apollo’, ‘three men in another boat’ and ‘holby city’.

source: hitwise.com

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What’s in a disconnect?

July 4, 2006 — Damien

summary: customer care can only go so far, when the customer’s relationship starts to fail with an operator, people will look for new solutions.

I’ve just moved flat and am stuck between two operators. The old place had BT and the existing place is still with Bulldog – with the old tenants vanished overseas, no one will disconnect the line. Thanks to local loop unbundling, I can’t even get a POTS lines connected.

Who seems to actually care about the customer here? Bulldog won’t talk to me and I couldn’t take my old number with me – without paying the £125 new install fee. Of course its not their fault but neither company wants to care for me. To actually make it worse the operator at Bulldog gave me the contact number for their customer, breaking all rules of privacy, but suggesting it would be the quickest way to get the line disconnected.

It’s little things like this that stop customers coming back or even considering an operator as their supplier for home, mobile, electricity or gas. When the service fails and the response from the front line customer care team is negative, isn’t it time to go elsewhere? Most people shop around for a better mobile for only a few days towards the end of their contract and never are actually free, if in this window they have a bad experience, they’ll take their talking elsewhere. It’s just a shame that even one of the best bundle offers in the UK from TalkTalk / Carphone Warehouse still needs me to get a line connected with BT first!

And so for now, It’s me, my laptop and a 3G datacard that gets me by.

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