March 23 , 2010

Record online viewing for Olympic Games

Total page views exceeded 215 million

Canada ’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium set a record in online viewership for a Canadian broadcaster during the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Winter Games with 28.5 million videos viewed, totaling 7.2 million hours of video consumption .  Canadians responded to the online offering in unprecedented numbers as 215 million pages were viewed by 12.3 million unique visitors *.  By the end of the Closing Ceremony, CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca had served up nearly five times more page views for Vancouver 2010 than Beijing 2008.

On average, online viewers watched 54 minutes of video each day of the Games.  With 14.4 million live HD video views and 14.1 million on-demand HD video views , Consortium websites delivered nearly six times the amount of video reported online for Beijing. Included in these numbers are 259,079 mobile video views. The most mobile streams (34,743) for Vancouver 2010 were delivered during the men’s gold medal hockey game.

“These are staggering numbers.  As proven by the average length of online viewers, the Consortium set a benchmark for what can be achieved through a quality video experience online,” said Alon Marcovici, Vice President of Digital Media and Research, Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium. “Canadians were given choice as to how, when and where they wanted to experience the Games, and we’re ecstatic they responded with such enthusiasm.”

From a technical standpoint, 6.2 Petabytes (or 620,000,000,000 megabytes) of video were delivered through CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca during the 17 days of the Games.  For comparison, a high traffic Canadian Internet site would serve approximately 2Pb/month. 

The CTVOlympics.ca-branded YouTube site saw an additional 5 million views (more than all video views for the Beijing Games).  Social media sites resulted in 675,000 referrals to Consortium sites, while viewers took advantage of social media interactions through Facebook and Twitter.

Digital Highlights Summary

• Total Page Views – 215,048,706, nearly five times the amount achieved for Beijing 2008
• Total Unique Visitors ** – 12.3 million.  Nearly half of all Internet users in Canada visited at least one of the two sites during the Games
• Total Video Views * – 28,589,989
• Live Video Views * – 14,445,942
• Highest number of concurrent streams – 133,785 (Closing Ceremony)
• VOD Video Views * – 14,144,047
• Hours of Video consumed – 7,212,106
• Average minutes online (per video visitor) – 54 minutes
• YouTube video views      – 5,708,830 from time of launch (Dec. 2009) to March 10