Industry currency Barb ratings will be used as the base measure for live TV viewing and seven-day playback via digital video recorder – but the full Live Plus 7 metric also includes stats from the BBC’s iPlayer video streaming service.

BBC Vision’s head of research David Bunker said: “To add in the iPlayer viewing figures we don’t just take the number of views or requests but we account for the actual amount of the programme watched so we have an ‘average audience’ to make it equivalent to the way linear TV audiences are reported.”

The BBC also factors in an estimate of the number of viewers per stream or download, which is based on survey data, says Bunker.

Live Plus 7 data will be made available monthly from next year, but in a blog post Bunker shared some figures for the first episode of the latest series of The Apprentice to give a taste of what’s to come.

He said in the first 24 hours, six million watched the show either live or via recorded playback. “But over the subsequent seven days a further 3.1m watched the same episode either from a recording, on iPlayer or from the narrative repeat – giving a Live Plus 7 figure of over 10m,” said Bunker.

BBC Vision director Jana Bennett said: “As our content becomes available in more ways than ever before, traditional methods of overnight measurement are now just one part of the picture. The new Live Plus 7 system will allow us to look at the total impact of a show and use this insight to continue creating the programmes our audiences want to see.”