August 11th, 2008
Numbers on the NBC’s Silverlight Olympic Coverage
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld has a great rundown of the numbers behind this weekend’s Olympic coverage. The highest day of coverage was on August 10th and it saw about 3.42 million video streams with 66.7 million page views and an average time spent on the site of 15 minutes. Pretty good numbers but as the BTL piece notes, that’s only about 2% of a typical YouTube day. So it didn’t exactly take the world by storm.
But one number I thought was interesting was that according to the Wall Street Journal, 90% of people watched the TV exclusively while only 0.2% watched the online version exclusively. But a decent number, 10%, watched both TV and the online version. This is the number I’m most interested in tracking through the games because I think that’s the best example of how people are changing their viewing habits towards rich media online. Giving up TV entirely would be a little ridiculous, but if the big media companies can augment TV coverage with more detailed (or more obscure) coverage on the web, that’s a winning formula.
In general, I’ve been pretty happy with the NBC and the Silverlight Olympics experience. Though some of the criticisms are well founded, that’s more to do with failure in the actual application than it is technology.
More info at Beet.tv.
