For the final week of the MOOC, we have been given the task of producing an infographic of our own – this means choosing a topic, gathering the information and presenting an idea to show the information in graphic form.
As my previous sketches have been for interactive infographics, I wanted to give a static graphic a go. Having so much freedom was pretty hard – there is a wealth of information and data out there, but choosing which story to go for and what angle to take was going to be hard! It was lucky then that I got a tweet from the team behind the BBC iPlayer pointing me to the latest performance report and that is when inspiration struck.
The BBC produce these performance reports every month and I read them with interest – I am a stats geek and love stuff like this. The report gives stats such as the viewing figures for content on iPlayer, popular programmes, usage by device type and the gender/age group of users. It’s a wealth of information that I find fascinating. But I also love it because it’s about the iPlayer – something I use for at least two hours a day and have a certain affection for, it’s brilliant. For non-UK residents, the iPlayer is a service that the BBC officially launched at the end of 2007 and allows viewers/listeners of BBC TV programmes/radio shows to replay missed content and to watch shows live via the internet. The iPlayer is available on PCs, tablets, mobile phones, via Smart TVs and via cable operators. In essence, it’s brilliant.
I am fairly certain that the report released by the BBC is not aimed at the typical iPlayer user – it feels more for those in the media or for those who have a specific interest in audience figures and so my goal for the infographic was to produce something that everyone could appreciate. Luckily for me, October was a record month for iPlayer usage with 213 million requests for TV or radio content – breaking the 200 million request barrier for the first time and so I had a nice little slant for my infographic. It also meant that the story had been picked up the press too:
BBC iPlayer tops 200 million monthly requests for first time – Digital Spy
iPlayer passes 200 million monthly requests for the first time – Digital TV Europe
Merlin and Jimmy Savile documentary help BBC iPlayer to record month – The Telegraph
BBC enjoys record iPlayer requests in October – Cable.co.uk
…but no-one had produced an infographic, and so I felt it was my duty to produce one to celebrate!
My goals for the infographic were as followed;
- Produce something for everyone – using the stats from the October performance report but make them easier to read and emphasise their relevance.
- What were the most popular shows in October? Why did it break the 200 million request barrier in October and not, say, during the Olympics?
- Who and what is using the iPlayer service? What proportion of requests are coming from tablets?
- Make a static graphic that could serve as a template for every performance report so that non-industry readers could glean the key information easier on one page as opposed to trawling through the report.
And so with all of this in mind (and not a lot of time to complete the task – despite two weeks to work on it, December is a crazy busy time at work!), here is what I have come up with…
October 2012: A record iPlayer month for the BBC (PDF)
Notes about the graphic
- This is a static graphic which uses the figures from the October 2012 iPlayer Performance report but could be used as a template for other monthly reports.
- I extracted the information that I thought would be interesting such as iPlayer requests since 2009 (as far back as the report goes), the gender breakdown of users, the devices used to access the service and the popular TV and radio shows in October. I have also put a few stats in the blurb at the top.
- The graphic style is largely similar to my last task with minimal use of colour – I stuck to pink as that is the predominant colour in the iPlayer branding.
- If I had more time, I would have liked to explore the peaks and troughs around the end of 2010 and beginning of 2011. Do peaks relate to the release of iPlayer apps on mobile and tablet devices for example?
- This graphic could be made interactive and this is a project I would like to work on in the future – especially to see the variation in the share of the device types – so watch this space! 🙂
AdeSquared 