3 - Peter Kay’s Car Share On commuting and commonplace roads

Summary

In 2014, the BBC launched a new marketing campaign for its iPlayer streaming and download service. Timed to coincide with the Easter vacation, a period when people often take to their cars for the national holiday weekend, the campaign included a series of ten-second promos for iPlayer with the strapline ‘download something good before you go’. Appearing in the BBC's regular broadcast schedule, the trailers depicted media viewing beyond conventional, sofa-bound ways of watching TV. Portraying travel delay on motorways, in airports and at ferry ports, the trailers presented iPlayer as suited to the needs of individuals and families on the move, able to distract a nagging child while stuck in traffic or kill time waiting for a car ferry. When iPlayer launched in 2007, the service was portrayed as a luminescent portal that audiences could leap through. By 2014 the promotional impetus changed. Striving to communicate the BBC's role as a digital public service broadcaster, marketing emphasised ‘moments and opportunities’ where iPlayer could fit into people's daily lives (Grainge 2017). These included moments inside cars.

It was perhaps in-keeping that a year after the ‘download something good before you go’ campaign, the BBC should use a car-based comedy to experiment with programme release through iPlayer. Following approval by the BBC Trust for a content trial of the Netflix-style model of distributing complete TV seasons at once, the BBC released all six episodes of Peter Kay's Car Share on iPlayer before its broadcast launch. A new sitcom based around two characters ( John and Kayleigh) making their way to and from work as part of a car share scheme, the series was the first time that original BBC1 content had premiered on iPlayer. The programme was released on iPlayer on 24 April 2015 before being broadcast on BBC1 a week later. The show swiftly broke iPlayer records, becoming the most watched ‘box-set’ on the service, with 2.8 million views in five days. Far from cannibalising traditional TV viewing, as some feared, the first episode on BBC1 was watched by 6.85 million people, representing 27 per cent of the UK broadcast audience (Conlan 2015). These figures made Peter Kay's Car Share (hereafter Car Share) one of the highest rated new sitcoms to premiere on any UK channel in the 2010s.