BBC smashes streaming record during the World Cup

BBC Head of Interactive & F1, Ben Gallop, said the BBC website smashed its previous streaming record by more than 2.5 times on just one day during the recent World Cup in South Africa.

Speaking at the ‘Sport & Technology: The Conference 2010’ by SportBusiness Group on Friday 16 July, Gallop said that the site delivered more than 800,000 simultaneous streams on Wednesday June 23 – the day England played its third group game against Slovenia and Andy Murray was on court for Day 3 of Wimbledon. The result smashed its previous best, which saw the Obama inauguration and Murray vs Roddick Wimbledon semi in 2009 pull in roughly 250,000-300,000 each. Gallop explained that as both games fell during working hours, the BBC had to plan strategically for a huge volume of traffic through the website, as UK workers logged on from their desks to follow the action live.

Gallop was speaking as part of the ‘Where next for broadcast technologies?’ panel, alongside Steve Plunkett, Director of Customer Innovation at Red Bee Media and Aidan Cooney, CEO of Opta. When asked whether interactive and social media activities took away from the main TV broadcast, Gallop argued that they have emerged as complementary. As an example, he pointed out that the ‘trending topic’ on Twitter is often reflective of what is on air at the time, reinforcing the importance of the traditional broadcaster. He said that in 2010 the BBC actually had far higher TV viewing figures than during the World Cup in 2006.

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