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."

Comments

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, a 1990s overlay/tunnelled network, was probably the closest it's ever gotten to general deployment outside specific controlled contexts. 2001's RFC 3170 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

[iserlohn]

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.