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August 14, 2012

How did the tech Olympics stack up?

Did London 2012 stack up as the much-hyped first mobile-tech based Olympics?

By Allan Swann

The first truly online broadcasted Olympics saw 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content across all online platforms, more than double seen for any previous events.

This includes 62 million requests for live video streams, 8 million for on-demand streams and 35 million for clips. This smashed the previous highs of 32 million for the Beijing Games and 38 million for the 2010 Football World Cup.

London 2012

The BBC saw a record breaking 92 million users accessing its BBC Sport website, smashing all previous records. This equates to around 9.5 million global users visiting per day, and 7.1 million UK visitors per day – the previous record was 7.4 million (global) and 5.7 million (UK).

On the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes of data, with the peak traffic moment occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold, at over 700 Gb/s.

London 2012 was much hyped as the first truly mobile games, with 9.2m UK mobile users accessing the BBC’s Olympics coverage – or 34% of all daily browsers – with 12 million using their mobiles to access video. 1.9 million users downloaded BBC’s Olympics mobile app for iOS and Android smartphones.

Other than concerns during the Men’s road race concerning the viability of the UK’s telecommunications infrastructure, the event functioned as planned (see CBR’s Olympics feature)

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On TV, BBC saw 23.7 million viewers on its 24 TV streams via the red button throughout the Games, with every stream seeing at least 100,000 viewers. Overall TV viewership was 51.9 million TV viewers – the largest UK TV audience reach for a major event for at least 10 years.The US also saw a large uptick in online viewership, its official broadcaster, NBC, saw 159.3 million viewers streaming the event online, more than double the 2008 Beijing Olympics (75.5 million). 64.4 million streams were live, more than 353% more than Beijing (14.0 million streams). 70% of total video streams were viewed on the web, 30% in NBC’s mobile apps.

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