Media News

This summer’s World Cup is proving a genuine watershed for live online TV streaming:

• BBC.co.uk served a peak of 800,000 concurrent live streams during the England-Slovenia match; Wimbledon was also streaming, but the BBC said the “vast majority” of viewers watched soccer.
• That’s 5.5% of the match’s peak BBC One TV audience of 14.3 million (in other words, about five percent of all the BBC’s England match views were online, not including the BBC HD channel).
• It blows away the BBC’s previous record, which it set only on Monday 21st June, of 355,000 streams of World Cup, Wimbledon and Budget coverage.
• And it’s only just shy of views YouTube’s U2 concert and Obama’s inauguration speech pulled
• Monday 21st June’s record had eclipsed the BBC’s previous peak of 270,000 live streams during last year’s Murray-Roddick match at Wimbledon.

Several factors are at work here…

• General consumer adoption of broadband has grown healthily.
• All of the content was taking place during daytime at UK offices, where people have internet on tap.
• It’s summer and it’s sunny; people have little inclination to work.
• People love live sport.

ITV.com claimed an average 130,000 views per match during the World Cup’s opening week, though the two England games it has carried so far were after office hours, when people are back at their TVs.

 

But all this growth comes with bandwidth challenges…

• UK internet traffic during the game was 55% up from a normal Wednesday, ISP Demon says (via Guardian.co.uk).
• Though business ISP easyNet Connect says traffic from offices was 226% up - so it’s clear how much UK workplace productivity would have dipped yesterday).
• Akamai figures from the top 100 news sites in its network show how, after both the England and USA games ended on Wednesday, “traffic spiked to 11.2 million visitors per minute, which moves the event past the 2008 presidential election as the second highest traffic spike of all-time”, Mashable observes.

Source: paidContent:UK