BBC iPlayer leaves ITV trailing

The BBC has a hefty five-year budget of £131m to develop the iPlayer, while ITV has spent just £20m on its media player and other online video initiatives.

In addition, the BBC iPlayer has benefited hugely from the fact that bbc.co.uk is already a massively popular online destination. Prior to the launch of the media player it had around 15 million monthly unique users, while ITV.com claims around 6 million.

The figures for December put ITV ahead of Channel 4's 4oD, which recorded 7.45m videos viewed, but fell far behind the 37.9m video streams that comScore recorded across all of the BBC's websites for the same month.

"Right now, however, the big winner is YouTube, which accounts for over a third of online video viewing, according to comScore," said Maude.