A number of broadcasting giants are covering London Olympics 2012, which is probably the most-anticipated and most-watched event this year. In US, NBC is taking the lead though it has been bitterly criticized for not providing live coverage. BBC has also revealed some statistics now, showing how it is experiencing record traffic due to Olympics coverage.

The BBC Internet blog has done a detailed post which shows just how much traffic is hitting its websites to catch Olympics coverage. The British broadcaster has received 29 million requests, so far, for Olympic video content. Out of these, a whopping 17 million people have stayed at least 15 minutes to watch the Olympics footage, which is a very impressive engagement rate. The huge surge of traffic has broken past record of highest traffic on BBC. The previous high for BBC was 5.7 million daily hits from UK and 7.4 million hits globally.

During the Olympics coverage. this bar has been raised to 8 million daily hits in UK alone; on the global scale, 10.1 million hits a day! What is one of the most interesting part of these statistics is, although desktop users are still the dominant traffic generators, mobile devices comprise a significant percentage of the hits. Of the total visitors BBC is receiving, 33 percent are from mobile devices. Moreover, 1.5 million users have downloaded the BBC Olympics app for iOS and Android.

The most popular clip on NBC’s coverage was Michael Phelps’ 19th medal win, this isn’t the case with BBC’s coverage. Rather, the most popular clip on BBC’s coverage is that of Men’s Road Race, which has been able to attract a total of 1.3 million views!

Source: BBC Internet Blog

Courtesy: The Verge