BBC to premiere up to 40 hours of new content on the iPlayer this year

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2013/feb/08/bbc-iplayer-premiere-content

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Up to 40 hours of BBC programming will be premiered on the BBC iPlayer this year prior to its first TV broadcast, the corporation has announced.

The BBC Trust approved the plans to premier TV shows on the iPlayer late last year but the BBC has not yet decided what the shows will be or when the 12-month experiment will begin.

A BBC spokesman confirmed that it will start "sometime this year" and involve a "range of content".

This is not the first time the BBC has piloted original content via the iPlayer. Last summer, BBC3's Feed My Funny initiative made seven comedy pilots available via the online video-on-demand service, leading to a commission of one of them, the hidden camera show Impractical Jokers.

Last year the BBC iPlayer also showed Pond Life – a mini-series of five Doctor Who mini episodes, which was downloaded 5m times.

The spokesman said: "We will build on this in 2013, and make more programming exclusively available to our audiences via BBC iPlayer."

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