Forward

BBC Director of Radio and Education James Purnell has confirmed the end of the BBC Radio iPlayer app before the end of this month, with the inevitability of a politician tied to a road map. It was launched seven years ago - it has taken the BBC Sounds team ten months to re-create some, but not all, of its most popular features.

The trigger for the cessation of iPlayer Radio ? "With nearly 1.9 million weekly signed in users, BBC Sounds is used by more people across our digital platforms than the old iPlayer Radio app."  Some of that is because they've already taken the iPlayer Radio functionality off the website. The BBC Board might like to calculate the costs so far of attracting 1.9m users, secured, by my guess, with external advertising contracts running at more than £1 per head.  The iPlayer Radio app was downloaded  1.8m times within a year of launch, without that sort of spending.