Techotic

The BBC has announced that its service BBC Worldwide is, with immediate effect, to commence offering programmes such as the popular Spooks, Torchwood, Little Britain, and Life on Mars via Apple’s video-enabled iPod, on the iPhone or Apple TV.

To start with there will be 10 popular series available on the UK version of the iTunes store at a price of £1.89/$3.80 for each episode, recent shows such as Life on Mars spin-off Ashes to Ashes will be available to purchase after they have finished their OnDemand run by BBC iPlayer.

The BBC says that it wishes to allow their potential audiences to have as wider choice of options as possible, when it comes to viewing their favorite BBC TV shows, the recent trend of people making the choice to watch television via iPods instead of the traditional ‘box’ has prompted the BBC to make this deal with Apple.

The BBC through, it is Worldwide service already offers short clips from his TV shows on MySpace and YouTube, the Beeb has also entered into a joint venture with British rivals Channel 4 and ITV to produce OnDemand TV programming online via broadband, in a project with the odd name of Kangaroo.

It is now hoped that iTunes TV store will widen its currently very limited choice of UK TV shows to include many of the extremely popular BBC programmes.

In addition to announcing the BBC deal with Apple, the British Broadcasting Corporation has also announced its latest statistics for the iPlayer, claiming that they now have attained a figure of seventeen million downloads, at times reaching half a million downloads per day.

The service was launched on Christmas Day 2007 and the BBC say that the number of downloads has been climbing steadily over the last eight weeks, but last week was the first time they had achieved the half a million per day numbers.

Last month in excess of 2.2 million separate viewers watched TV shows using the BBC iPlayer, with a total of 11 million showers who either downloaded or ‘live’ streamed via the service.

The most popular show, since the launch is the cult Ashes to Ashes, which is a follow-up to the incredibly popular Life on Mars.

The iPlayer is also having a useful side effect for the BBC by increasing visitors to their websites by an extremely large 29% over last year’s figures, with visits to iPlayer itself accounting for over one and a quarter million visitors each week.