Final Tally: Olympics Web and P2P Numbers
The Olympics are over, and it’s time for a final medal count. No, we’re not talking about Michael Phelps here, nor about the fact that the Chinese got more gold medals than everyone else. Instead, we’re gonna take one last look at where people went to watch the Olympics online.
First the good news for NBC: NBCOlympics.com served a total of 75.5 million streams during the games despite all the uproar about Silverlight, tape delays and a bad UI. The site clocked a total of 9.9 million hours of online video coverage. That’s impressive, even if NBC’s online video advertising revenue wasn’t, but there are plenty of other success stories all around the globe.
The BBC also had some major success with its web-based offering, serving almost 40 million streams until late last week, according to the BBC Internet blog. It had almost 200,000 concurrent viewers watching a total of 6.5 million hours of Olympic coverage - and those figures don’t even include the competitions held the final weekend, nor the closing ceremony. The BBC hasn’t published any numbers for its iPlayer yet either, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the video platform saw its traffic triple during the games. The broadcaster only served 2.5 million streams during the games in Athens four years ago.
Other European countries saw large numbers of online viewers as well. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) estimates that a total of 18 million viewers tuned into streams from the games, and its member networks served a total of 180 million streams online. The BBC is a member of the EBU, which means that the Brits caused almost a fourth of all of Europe’s Olympic video streams.
China’s state television network CCTV saw even bigger numbers online. The network told the New York Times that more than 100 million people accessed Olympic video streams on its web site.
But CCTV’s site wasn’t the only way to watch the Olympics in China. The network also sub-licensed the online rights to P2P TV platforms like PPLive. The company told us that a total of 5.5 million viewers used its client to watch the opening ceremony, with 1.6 million concurrent users tuning in during the ceremony itself.
PPLive’s daily concurrent viewers during the Olympics. Image courtesy of PPLive.
PPLive saw similarly high numbers during the rest of the games, with daily peak concurrent viewers anywhere between 210,000 and 500,000 during regular competition days, and climbing up to 820,000 viewers for the closing ceremony.
Finally, the pirates didn’t do too shabby, either. The most popular torrent of the opening ceremony still remains in the top 10 of sites like Mininova and The Pirate Bay, with Mininova alone clocking nearly 600,000 downloads for a collection of files that totals about five gigabytes.
Downloaders of the opening ceremony torrent by country. Source: Wiredset.com.
This particular torrent had almost 100,000 seeders at one point, according to market research company Wiredset. Also interesting: The vast majority of downloaders are from China, with the U.S. only accounting for eight percent of its downloads.
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[...] runs the numbers and reports that NBC served 75.5 million streams during the Olympics while the BBC had upwards of 200,000 concurrent viewers getting their games on. Meanwhile, [...]
ScribeMedia.Org | That’s Gotta Be Some Kind of Record on August 28th, 2008 at 6:17 am - Permalink
[...] runs the numbers and reports that NBC served 75.5 million streams during the Olympics while the BBC had upwards of 200,000 concurrent viewers getting their games [...]
That’s Gotta Be Some Kind of Record : Michael Michael on August 28th, 2008 at 6:18 am - Permalink
[...] estadísticas interesantes de lo juegos olímpicos recién terminados; en China más de 100 millones de personas miraron los [...]
¿Porque se necesita mejorar la publicidad en video online? | Denken Über on August 28th, 2008 at 7:56 am - Permalink
Very cool, saw some interesting graphics at: http://tinyurl.com/65zhn9 also…
Marko on August 28th, 2008 at 9:15 am - Permalink
Forget revenue, what did NBCU’s Olympics Video Cost?…
It is now well publicized that NBCU left a lot of money on the table for the Olympics online… but what was spent to deliver the Silverlight enabled experience? The following numbers provided by New……
HmmConvenient Daily on August 28th, 2008 at 10:31 am - Permalink
Can we stop quoting the EMarketer estimate of NBC’s online revenue as fact until we have some other verification? They may be exactly right, but without more info (maybe in GE’s next corporate earnings statement?), it’s just an educated guess.
Does anyone know if Microsoft paid NBC in exchange for putting the video on Silverlight vs. some other platform? If so, that would count as additional online revenue not included in that guess.
SR on August 28th, 2008 at 3:50 pm - Permalink
[...] Olympic Numbers - Massive Live Broadcast on the Internet ?? Who’s the biggest in Live Concurrency? August 29, 2008 Posted by John Furrier in social media. Tags: China, Internet Streaming, NBC, Olympics 2008, PPLive trackback To date I’ve been trying to find the record for most concurrent viewers of a “Live” event. NewTeeVee has a breakdown and detailed article on Internet usage on the Olympics 2008 in China. [...]
Olympic Numbers - Massive Live Broadcast on the Internet ?? Who’s the biggest in Live Concurrency? « Furrier.org - Business & Technology Blog on August 28th, 2008 at 5:54 pm - Permalink
[...] To date I’ve been trying to find the record for most concurrent viewers of a “Live” event. NewTeeVee has a breakdown and detailed article on Internet usage on the Olympics 2008 in China. [...]
BroadDev - Unified Communications, Virtualization, Security, and Web 2.0 » Did a Small Company in China Outperform Cisco in Delivering Live Video? on August 28th, 2008 at 6:01 pm - Permalink
[...] at NewTeeVee, there is a detailed look at the way that the streams were served and who served them. They also have a great discussion of [...]
Streaming and the Beijing Olympics - Is it live? Or is it NBC? on August 28th, 2008 at 6:27 pm - Permalink
More numbers on China http://tmt.interfaxchina.com/news/582
jseng on August 29th, 2008 at 1:00 pm - Permalink
[...] http://newteevee.com/2008/08/28/final-tally-olympics-web-and-p2p-numbers/And the early European summary… [...]
Background noise from News « Aliens ate my GUI on September 5th, 2008 at 12:58 am - Permalink
[...] the Chinese P2P TV service that keeps impressing us with its huge user base, launched a browser plug-in just in time for the Beijing [...]
A Browser-Based Joost? Welcome To the Club « NewTeeVee on September 5th, 2008 at 4:35 pm - Permalink
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[...] estadísticas interesantes de lo juegos olímpicos recién terminados; en China más de 100 millones de personas miraron los [...]
Bienvenido a WwW.UrBaNiCaNo.NeT:Tf on September 17th, 2008 at 10:20 am - Permalink
[...] oversees user experience and design at the BBC, he told me that during the Olympics, the iPlayer accounted for nearly 20 percent of the total broadband traffic in the UK, and at present has garnered about 10 [...]
iPlayer for Mac Coming This Month - GigaOM on November 10th, 2008 at 12:30 pm - Permalink