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

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-for-gold-in-the-bandwidth-olympics dept.

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."

4 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. A fraction of what it could have been by bobbutts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Imagine if it wasn't restricted to a small fraction of internet users.

    1. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by iserlohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Don't forget about the 24 *extra* HD channels that the BBC put on just for the Olympics. Was able to drop into any one of the Olympic events at any time through the red button, or just by navigating to the correct channel on my Freesat box. It really did blow my mind. Above all - no ads! The TV license is normally pretty good value for money, but the Olympic coverage was a cut above. Really feel for those that had to endure NBC.

      --
      :. Ultimate Control Dedicated/VM Servers
  2. Re:Torrent stream? by rjr162 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Pretty sure they used a CDN or two to handle the traffic, and its possible the CDN uses a hybrid mode which works basically like combining a regular CDN server network with a p2p torrent network

  3. Re:Torrent stream? by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Interesting

    So, you're browsing the internet and watching the streaming video, as many people do. You inadvertantly find out the result of the 100 meters on facebook/twitter minutes before the race even starts on your video.

    No, people won't accept minutes of delay for "live" events. A few seconds, yes, so long as one isn't betting on the event. But a few seconds is useless for torrent type distribution.