Record numbers for BBC Lockdown Learning
January 21, 2021
Last week (January 11th to 17th), children’s programming on BBC iPlayer was requested a record breaking 40.8 million times as children turn to the BBC for education and entertainment during lockdown.
The figures are the highest BBC Children’s has ever achieved on iPlayer, beating last year’s record of 40.2 million requests.
The BBC’s education offer, Lockdown Learning, which rolled out across more platforms last week, attracted 5.8 milliom users to the Bitesize website, an increase of 12 per cent from the first week of Bitesize Daily on April 20th 2020.
On BBC iPlayer, Bitesize Daily was requested 971k times with lessons for 5-7 year olds proving the most popular, accounting for 439k requests.
Lockdown Learning on BBC Two and CBBC also saw a big increase in audience numbers, with CBBC’s average audience for the slot increasing by 355 per cent across the week. The overnight average audience for BBC Two was 290k, a 5 per cent increase vs the slot average over the previous 52 weeks.
CBeebies programming performed particularly strongly on BBC iPlayer, breaking its own record for number of BBC iPlayer requests in a single week. In total there were 32.3 million requests for CBeebies programming.
The four CBeebies apps had more than 800,000 unique visitors last week, proving Playtime Island, Go Explore, Get Creative and Storytime continue to attract pre-schoolers in their droves.
Patricia Hidalgo, Director of BBC Children’s and Education, said: “As with the last lockdown, BBC Children’s and Education continues to provide vital support, entertainment and educational resources for parents and children across the UK. We are thrilled that millions of households are making use of these services for home-schooling help and some much needed entertainment.”