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With Olympics coverage pushing IPTV sales in China, it seems that iPlayer access is helping to drive Virgin Media VOD usage.

Virgin Media reported that customers accessing video-on-demand content were now doing so on average 24 times a month (taken from data recorded April – June 2008), a big increase from the 14 times a month recorded in the same period last year. Virgin Media reported 10.5million views of iPlayer content in June, providing an enormous contribution to the 38million views a month of VOD content from Virgin. This represented only a 5% increase from Q1:08, and a 92% increase on the same period in 2007. Virgin are clearly very proud of their cable exclusivity with iPlayer, as their second quarter report stated:

“Turning to TV, we were delighted to launch BBC iPlayer on our platform, which achieved 10.5m views in June. We are the only TV platform in the UK to carry this service and believe this significantly enhances our TV offering.”

The BBC keep on pushing the boundaries of what they can and can’t get away with in terms of market competition, with the BBC Trust currently carrying out a consultation over whether they could launch BBC services (TV and radio) on mobiles. The consultation is due to end on August 22nd. If it goes ahead, it seems as if the iPlayer motto of “making the unmissable, unmissable” will be strengthened even further. ITN have argued against the proposal, stating that it will destroy the development of commercial models of mobile advertising. The BBC’s response was that providing content on mobiles would be well within their remit – to increase delivery of BBC services to under-served groups such as 16-to-34 year olds. Figures from their year long mobile TV trial weren’t strong, with only 580 views per day, whereby BBC One, Three and News 24 were offered on Orange, Vodafone, 3 and T-Mobile. However, this may only reflect awareness of the service for 3G users, as it still accounted for more than half of mobile TV viewing on T-Mobile.

Whatever happens, the last few months have served to show what a cold-turkey the iPlayer hasn’t turned out to be, despite difficulties and critics along the way. It’ll be interesting to watch the continual debate over the relevance of the license fee - if you can access BBC programming via non-TV portals (your PC or mobile), then why should you pay to receive it on your TV? What do you think?

You can read of Virgin Media’s Q2 report in full, here.

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