Last year, people watched 2.9bn TV shows in the BBC’s iPlayer app here in the UK. Startlingly, a third of those – nearly a billion streams – were children’s shows.
That’s why the BBC is launching a brand new app today: BBC iPlayer Kids, aimed purely at children. It’ll offer shows from the broadcaster’s CBeebies and CBBC channels to stream or download to watch offline.
The app is free to download and use, with no in-app purchases or advertising. It’s only available here in the UK though.
As parents, you can register a profile for each of your children, with the app only taking their name and age, but no other personal data – and it doesn’t track their habits either.
It uses the latter to decide what shows to recommend to them: four year-olds won’t be able to watch CBBC shows like Wolfblood, for example.
Apps Playground went to the launch this morning, to hear the BBC’s director of children’s content Alice Webb explain the thinking behind the app.
She said that children have “spoken loudly and clearly, and shown how important on-demand viewing is for them” with those stats from the main iPlayer app.
Webb said there’ll be more than 10,000 episodes of shows in the iPlayer Kids app every year – “stuffed full of homegrown UK content… free of charge, free from commercial influence”.
For now, the BBC says it won’t be shutting down the main CBeebies and CBBC channels, even if the app proves hugely popular. “We are absolutely about riding two horses here. This is about linear and digital,” said Webb. Linear being the TV channels, and digital being the app.
iPlayer Kids only has BBC shows at the moment, but there’s potential for it to open up. Not yet to YouTube channels like The Diamond Minecart, Little Baby Bum and Stampy – although we think that would be a good idea – but more to other kinds of videos.
“We’d like to look at other public-service organisations to begin with: the RSPB, Natural History Museum, Sport England,” said Webb. “But yes, we very much see the BBC as an opportunity to be more open – to be a platform for others.”
She added that there may also be scope to put some videos from non-children’s BBC shows in: natural history documentaries, for example, or child-safe outtakes from comedy shows.
BBC iPlayer Kids is a free download for iPhone and iPad, and a free download for Android.