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London 2012 Olympic Games Media Consumption


The primary London 2012 Olympic games are over, but they're clearly not forgotten. Several market studies highlighted the multi-platform or multi-device media consumption trends. There were some interesting regional variations within the market study findings.

As an example, according to a pre-Olympics market study by Ipsos, while 65 percent of survey respondents say they would be watching the competition on TV, 23 percent were rooting for their countries via the Internet -- a number that swells to 34 percent in APAC countries and 43 percent in BRIC countries.

Six percent of people said they would watch at least part of the Olympics on mobile devices and 4 percent intended to watch on their media tablets.

Ipsos said that they expected these results to rise as people become more comfortable viewing smaller screens and choose to watch in real-time, rather than coming home to hours and hours of recorded video.

In fact, 20 percent -- 31 percent in APAC countries and 37 percent in BRIC countries -- say there is a possibility they would download an smartphone app so they could watch the games live.

Moreover, 21 percent -- 37% in BRIC countries, 33 percent in APAC countries and 32 percent in Middle East and Africa -- said that they might download an app so they could get updates on the games.

TV Broadcaster Analysis of Media Consumption

In yet another study, the BBC shared the findings from their post-Olympics market assessment, which also uncovered some very interesting data points.

Record breaking browsers to BBC Sport online -- with 55 million (global) and 37 million (UK) browsers to the BBC Sport site in total across the Games, and an average of 9.5 million (global) and 7.1 million (UK) browsers per day, easily breaking all previous records (previous record for a single day was 7.4 million global and 5.7 million UK).

Video drives viewing across all online platforms -- with 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content across all online platforms, more than double seen for any previous events.

First truly mobile Olympic games -- with 9.2 million UK mobile browsers to the BBC’s Olympics coverage, making up 34 percent of all daily browsers to BBC’s Olympic coverage, and 12 million requests from mobiles for video throughout the Games.

Opening up the breadth of the Games via BBC Red Button -- with 23.7 million viewers to the 24 SD, HD and Freeview streams throughout the Games, and every single stream seeing at least 100,000 viewers.

Over a 24 hour period on the busiest Olympic days, total traffic to bbc.co.uk exceeded that for the entire BBC coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2010 (matches) -- on the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8 petabytes, with the "peak traffic moment" occurring when Bradley Wiggins won Gold with over 700 Gb/s.

Comparison of record-setting media consumption -- again, video proved hugely popular, with 106 million requests for video content throughout the Games (that included 62 million for live streams, 8 million for on-demand streams and 35 million for clips), smashing the previous highs of 32 million for the Beijing Games and 38 million for the 2010 World Cup.

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