BBC Delivered 2.8PB On Busiest Olympics Day, Reaching 700Gb/s As Wiggo Won Gold

Qedward writes "The BBC has revealed that on the busiest day of its London 2012 Olympics coverage it delivered 2.8 petabytes worth of content, peaking when Bradley Wiggins won gold, where it shifted 700Gb/s. It has also said that over a 24-hour period on the busiest Olympic days it had more traffic to bbc.co.uk than it did for the entire BBC coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2010 games. They revealed they had 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content, which included 12 million requests for video on mobile devices across the whole of the Games. Mobile saw the most uptake at around 6pm when people had left the office but still wanted to keep informed of the latest action. Tablet usage, however, reached a peak at around 9pm, where people were using it as a second screen or as they continued to watch the games in bed."

Re:Multicast

[Trepidity]

Unfortunately, multicast basically doesn't work on the current internet, at least not for most users, because most networks don't properly forward it. The MBONE [savetz.com], a 1990s overlay/tunnelled network, was probably the closest it's ever gotten to general deployment outside specific controlled contexts. 2001's RFC 3170 [ietf.org] on deployment difficulties is largely still accurate, with the exception of its first sentence, "IP Multicast will play a prominent role on the Internet in the coming years."

Re:A fraction of what it could have been

[petermgreen]

though I don't see why it couldn't be offered as a paid service to offset our licence fee.

Trouble is in a lot of cases the BBC can't legally do that either because they bought UK only rights to the content in question from the content owners or for content they created themselves they have sold exclusive country specific rights to foreign broadcasters.

So any subscription based iPlayer for foreigners would end up with only a fraction of the content the UK iPlayer gets.

Also afaict the BBC gets traffic to most UK ISPs virtually free due to peering agreements whereas for foreigners they would have to pay transit fees. The prices for foreigners would have to be high enough to reflect this.

Re:A fraction of what it could have been

[chrb]

The BBC also recorded some of the events in Super Hi Vision [bbc.co.uk] Engadget has a review: [engadget.com] "while watching the swimming event and cut-down highlights of the opening ceremony, there were moments when we could almost have believed we were looking not at a projected image, but rather through a window direct onto the Olympic Stadium or Aquatics Center itself."

Re:A fraction of what it could have been

[cpu6502]

In the U.S. NBC has carried the excluive contract from 1992 through 2020. Apparently the International Olympic Committee likes them. The company paid $1.18 billion for the exclusive U.S. television rights, and they sold $1.3 billion in advertising, so that's a profit (versus 2006/10 when they lost 0.2 billion each). Here are NBC's stats:

- 32 million viewers during Primetime broadcast/reruns (highest level since the 1976 Olympics)
- 73% of Americans followed on television. 17% online. 12% on social media sites.
- "London's 219.4 million total viewers (you were a viewer if you watched at least six minutes) made NBC's Games the most-watched TV event ever, breaking Beijing's record of 215 million viewers."
- NBC's digital stats after Week 1 of the Olympics (so the total pull is probably double)

â34 Million Live Streams, Up 333% vs. Beijing
â744 Million Page Views, Up 160 Million from Beijing
â6.2 Million Devices Verified by Cable, Satellite and Telco Customers

Re:A fraction of what it could have been

[SimonTheSoundMan]

BBC also transmitted in 3D.

Re:A fraction of what it could have been

[F.Ultra]

Don't know about the BBC in particular but it is very common here in Europe to show the Olympics live regardless of the time. Then there are of course sumamries and tape delays shown during the normal day time for people who was asleep during the live events.

Re:Torrent stream?

[Anonymous Coward]

The BBC used HTTP Dynamic Streaming for the Olympics streams, handing out 4 second fragments of video in a range of bitrates over HTTP. Akamai and Limelight did the heavy lifting, but no special client software was needed beyond the flash-based player on the BBC site.