One million iPhones tune in to the ABC

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 01 September 2010 15:26

Your IT - Mobility

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is seeing "unprecedented" access to its web site from mobile phones - with one million iPhone app downloads in 17 months.

"ABC mobile applications for iPhone, iPad and Android devices have all broken significant download milestones in the last week," the broadcaster said.

"To date there have been: one million downloads of the ABC iPhone app in 17 months; 200,000 downloads of the triple j Unearthed iPhone app in seven months; 100,000 downloads of the ABC iPad app in 2.5 months and 10,000 downloads of the ABC Android app in 17 months.


Visits to the ABC's mobile browser based website (http://m.abc.net.au) have doubled in the last twelve months to reach 50,800 in the second week of August. The following week saw over 31,000 visits on Election Day alone, at an average of seven minutes each.

The ABC's 'Australia Votes' app for iPhone, Android, selected Symbian/Java and BlackBerry phones clocked up 50,000 downloads and, according to the ABC< "was so popular that the number of downloads per second placed the app as 7th on the Global iTunes rank of Top 100 apps (Top Movers) at 4pm AEST on Saturday 21st."

Bruce Belsham, acting director of ABC Innovation, said: "The ABC followed audiences onto mobile with a fairly simple offering 18 months ago. Since then we have seen a rapid acceleration of people using mobile devices to get their news and entertainment. The ABC too has been moving quickly, becoming a leader in shaping content for smart phones and touch screen tablets.

"It's important we keep pace with the way people actually live and the popularity of these mobile services indicate that audiences love having the ABC at hand when they are out and about."