BBC deserves networking Gold

15 Aug 2012

Data released by the BBC shows the scale of the challenge that it faced as it handled 106 million requests for Olympic video content during London 2012.

The BBC promised audiences that it would give them ‘the Olympic wherever and whenever you want it’, and despite huge traffic flows during the two weeks of London 2012, the public-service broadcaster was as good as its word.

As the dust settles on London 2012, the Corporation has released traffic figures that show that, on its busiest day of its Games coverage (1 August), it delivered 2.8 petabytes worth of content, or one quadrillion bytes. When Bradley Wiggins won gold in the men’s time trial that day, its networks hit their peak, shifting 700 Gigabytes per second (700 Gb/s).

It was the first Olympic Games where content was delivered from every sport and every venue to users on PCs, tablets mobiles and smart TVs. Overall, in the two weeks from 28 July to 11 August, more than 34 million unique users accessed the BBC Olympics section of BBC Online. Across all online platforms, audiences notched up 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content. The most requested live video stream, meanwhile, was of the tennis singles finals, where Serena Williams and Andy Murray won gold medals, which saw 820,000 requests.

In a blog post, the BBC’s head of product at BBC Sport and London 2012, Cait O’Riordan, calls the event “the first truly digital Olympics.”

“The peak audiences for Team GB’s medal moments were bigger than anything we’ve ever seen,” she writes. “Over a 24-hour period on the busiest Olympic days, Olympic traffic to bbc.co.uk exceeded that for the entire BBC coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2010 games.”

Data from the Corporation, meanwhile, reveals how device usage varied during each day of London 2012. PC usage peaked at lunchtime on weekdays and for mid-afternoon Team GB events, suggesting a large audience of people at work. Mobile device usage peaked at around 6pm, as they left the office for home, and tablet usage rose in the mid- to late evening, peaking at around 9pm.

It also shows how, between the peaks of Team GB medal moments, viewers moved across different streams on BBC Online, in order to check out different events. For example, at around 6pm on Saturday 4 August, audiences finished watching GB gold in women's team pursuit cycling on stream 7, in order to take a look at the end of Brazil v Honduras in the football on stream 6, before switching back to stream 7 as the cycling action kicked off again, O’Riordan reports.

The infrastructure and video delivery systems that the BBC put in place in anticipation of London 2012 traffic flows will now be used for future coverage across the BBC, according to O’Riordan. And just as Olympic organisers are hoping for a London 2012 ‘legacy effect’ from the Games, so does the broadcaster. “We also hope to leave a lasting legacy in terms of audiences to BBC Online,” writes O’Riordan.