http://www.cablefax.com/cfax/previous/newsletters/cfaxdaily/62090.html
Live streaming of major sports events like the Super Bowl only started 2 years ago, whenNBC drew 346K online viewers per minute on average.
Last year, CBS' s streaming pulled in 508K viewers per minute for the championship. This year, Fox scored 528K average viewers per minute through its Fox Sports Go app, up 4% YOY.
Among digital metrics studied by Fox Sports ' svp of mobile and advanced platforms Clark Pierce was the 1.1mln concurrent users (peak audience) during the 3rd quarter of the game.
The metric "aligns nicely with what we do on the broadcast side," Pierce told us. He said other key metrics include the number of streams per use and the average time viewers spend on the app. During Super Bowl, users spent an average of 47.8 mins watching the live stream. Normally, "the smaller the screen, the shorter the session," Pierce said, noting users would "snack" content on phones and view longer-form content on tablets and PCs.
And since this year's Super Bowl was the 1st major streaming event for Fox Sports Go, launched in Oct, numbers weren't the only things that matter. "The main goal going into it was to promote the app and create awareness... and we achieved it," Pierce said. Fox owns online and tablet streaming rights of Super Bowl while Verizon Wireless has exclusive phone rights.
Viewers of live sports streaming are the same people who would "check scores on their mobile devices when they are at the post office or airport" and instead of checking scores, they are checking the live game, Pierce said.
The 1.1mln peak audience was still a relatively small number compared to the game's average TV audience of 112.2mln and not even close to the all-time record for a live-streamed event: Red Bull Stratos space jump in Oct '12, which drew more than 8mln concurrent viewers on YouTube. "We anticipated an audience of that size, so we were ready for it," Pierce said.
Teaming with Akamai Technologies, Fox Sports' standard streaming practice relies on adaptive bit rate techniques to deliver video profiles of up to 3 Mbps and as low as 100 Kbps to PCs, and between 4 Mbps and 110 Kbps through the iPad app.
Here's a question for the engineers: What happens when half or more of Super Bowl viewers decide to watch the game online or on mobile devices? Would networks today have enough capacity to handle it? For now, NBC Sports ' streaming capacity will be tested as it has scheduled to stream more than 1K hours of live Sochi Olympics programs as well as Premier League contest, some of which will occur during the Winter Games. The net has promised to stream all Premiere League matches via NBC Sports Live Extra. All eyes are on NBC now.
The Opening Ceremony of the London Olympics had quite an effect on overall broadband traffic, especially in the US, while the ceremony for Sochi Olympics on Fri didn't appear to have had the same hold on broadband streamers. This according to bandwidth management firm Procera Networks, which analyzed broadband traffic across fixed and wireless IPSs. The impact of the streaming for Fri was minimal, the firm said.
Specifically,Netflix took little hit in bandwidth usage from the norm, unlike the 2012 Olympics. "None of the networks that we looked at had any statistically significant increase or drop from normal rates, and YouTube was similarly unaffected," the company said. However, Olympic streaming in the northern part of North America did increase, representing 10% of overall streaming during a peak time on a large cable op's network. That compared to the less than 1% of total streaming traffic on a large cable op's network in the southern US. A comparison of regional ISPs that spanned fixed, mobile and a wireless ISPs showed that mobile usage was "extremely low, WISP usage was spotty and fixed was consistent," Procera said.
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