BBC iPlayer won World Cup 2018
The BBC iPlayer World Cup 2018 service was certainly a winner with viewers. In fact, Auntie Beeb fielded a massive 56.3m requests over the tournament.
Figures just in from the BBC lists the huge jump in viewing figures from 15.9m requests at Brazil 2014 to 56.3m this year.
According to the report, the Sweden v England game became the BBC’s highest online-viewed live programme ever with 3.8m (3.9m including on-demand) requests on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport.
Top 5 requested World Cup matches
Further findings show that the top five most requested matches online across BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer live and on-demand were as follows:
- Sweden v England (3.9m)
- Tunisia v England (3.09m)
- England v Panama (3.05m)
- Brazil v Belgium (2.2m)
- Spain v Russia (2.1m)
Online audience
Additionally, 49.2m UK unique browsers came to the BBC’s World Cup web pages (32.3m in 2014). Also, virtual reality made a major breakthrough as the VR app was downloaded over 400k times, and over 2.5m people registered for a BBC account.
450,000 UK unique browsers used BBC Sport’s online Player Rater, generating 11.9m ratings. The highest rated player on average was South Korea and Spurs star, Son Heung-Min, with 7.43. Croatia’s Luka Modric, received the highest rating for an individual performance with 8.45 against Argentina.
England’s highest rated player on average was Kieran Trippier (7.19). Jordan Pickford’s (8.41) penalty performance against Colombia earned him the top England performance.
The World Cup final between France and Croatia captured a peak BBC One TV audience of 10.4m with 54 per cent peak share, with 2m live requests (and 36,000 on-demand) to stream the match online on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport.
So, it might not have come home but it certainly moved sports viewing forwards.
