Over the past two weeks, Sandvine has covered the impact the live streaming of the Olympic Games has had on North American fixed access networks.
With the games now over I wanted to create a summary post of the event, but rather than writing a few hundred words of text, I thought it would be easiest to show off this data visually.
Below is a graphic we prepared that attempts to sum up the impact Olympic streaming had in the US. In it you can see the variance in Olympic streaming traffic throughout the games, and the accompanying event that drove traffic to its peak each day.
To nobody’s surprise,
When looking at the big picture, it appears as if it was the popularity of individual athletes that played a big role in generating traffic spikes. While any event Usain Bolt saw big numbers, so too did any event involving US swimmers Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte, who combined to help to make swimming the second most popular sport to stream.
Overall, I found the Olympic live streaming experience to be great, and a noticeably better than the experience I had during the last Olympic games, just two years ago. It will be very interesting to see how live streaming will continue to grow in popularity and how that growth will impact how people watch the Sochi Olympics in 2014.
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Great graphic Dan! Indeed worth a thousands words