According to British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), the number of people watching the BBC iPlayer service on tablets has surpassed that on the handsets; a fact which is evident from the figures which show that the iPlayer service  witnessed more requests from tablets vis-a-vis the smartphones for the first time ever in March.

Going by the company's BBC iPlayer performance pack for March, there were nearly 2000,000 more requests for the catch-up service from tablet devices as compared to the requests from smartphones. The company also said that tablet-watchers mostly opted for TV viewing instead of radio catch-up.

However, when radio-listening as well as TV-watching options on iPlayer were together taken into consideration, the BBC figures showed that tablets and smartphones were almost at par, with 15 percent each.

With the tablets having clearly overtaken the smartphones for the first time ever, BBC said that the combined BBC iPlayer requests from both tablets and smartphones accounted for 30 percent - that is, a total of 81 million requests - of all BBC iPlayer requests.

In the wake of the growing BBC iPlayer requests from tablets and smartphones, BBC revealed in a recent announcement that it has plans underway to some content on its iPlayer service before it is shown on TV.

Noting that BBC intends building on the increasing number of iPlayer request in 2013, BBC's head of digital communications Sophie Brendel told The Inquirer that the company would "make a small number of additional programmes exclusively available to our audiences via BBC iPlayer."