The BBC's director of Future Media and Technology, Ashley Highfield, confirmed the figure at the recent Google Zeitgiest event.

According to Highfield, the total number of requests for downloads and streams of BBC programmes in April was 21 million, rising from 17.2 million in March.

And average weekly viewers of BBC iPlayer reached 1.4 million in April, up from 1.1 million in March.

Viewers' favourites were Doctor Who and The Apprentice, which dominated the top 20 most requested programmes to download or stream on BBC iPlayer last month.

Highfield is also the chief executive of the Kangaroo project, which aims to bring on-demand content from the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to UK surfers some time this year.

The iPlayer service has attracted controversy since a pre-release beta version hit the web last summer. Open source advocates criticised iPlayer for only working on Microsoft platforms initially, though Mac and Linux compatibility has since been added.

More recently, ISP Tiscali proposed that the BBC should pay a tax to help with costs of extra network traffic caused by the iPlayer, which has proved immensely popular since its launch.

www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer

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