I think this very much comes down to the vision of one of our previous directors general, Lord Birt. Back in the 1990s, when, to be honest, many people were skeptical that the BBC should have a role online, he felt very strongly about it. Some people felt this was not for the BBC and that we should stick to what we did best--television and radio. John Birt had the vision to see that with the convergence in technologies, even 10 to 12 years ago, there would eventually be little distinction between radio, television, and online. If you're using the iPlayer today, are you online, watching television, or listening to the radio, and does it matter? There is a very exciting opportunity for audiences, as I mentioned in my opening remarks, to get more value out of programs they might otherwise miss. I think it has been a great success for us.
We began with text services online. There was no broadband in those days. Those text services were very strongly linked to our already popular television and radio services. They were promoted from those television and radio services. People who watched BBC One and saw a program, let's say about life in the Amazon rainforest by David Attenborough, and wanted to find out more, would be directed to the website where there would be more material. Some of it would be especially structured, for example, for children, who might be doing projects at school and that sort of thing.
There was always a strong link between our television and radio services and the online service. People started to think there must be something to this online business after all. It seems amazing that we're only talking about 10 or 15 years ago. In those days there were a lot of people who felt there was no real interest in the Internet, in online, and that it wasn't really anything to do with them. But as soon as they realized there was content that could attract them, they wanted to explore.
We looked at this a little while ago. It's very hard to be absolutely sure why someone went online in the first place. Some people were attracted by other things, but we reckon there are several million people in the U.K. who first bought a computer and an Internet connection simply because of the BBC's services, and then they discovered the rest of the Internet through us. That's quite an achievement. I think we're now driving a great deal of the move from narrowband to broadband, again, through services like our iPlayer, which I mentioned earlier, that give people on-demand access to audiovisual content.