700Gb / second – The Wiggo Effect

The BBC are justifiably proud of some of the stats they have released today relating to their performance during the 2012 London Olympics. Having seen records of their own broken with number of users online, increases of new users, bandwidth used and concurrent streams.

With the BBC showing up to 24 different streams online, it was bound to break bandwidth records, serving up to 2.8 Petabytes (1 Petabyte is 1024 Gigabytes) of data is no small feat. Over 51 million people consumed content from the BBC during the olympics.

During the peak, they were streaming at 700 Gigabits per second, Bradley Wiggins winning gold brought more users online to see the event. Move over the Slashdotting, we’ve now got the Wiggo Effect.

One thing that stands out from the stats is the number of users now watching from various mobile devices. Phones or tablets via both 3g (mobile data) and wifi. It appears that a lot of us were catching up on activities on phones during commuting times, but using tablets once home.

The BBC will now continue to use the infrastructure and technology they have put in place for future events, both sports and other events. With the olympics having brought a lot of new users to the online systems, now the task is to keep those users online, bringing them back for further events.

The BBC published more detailed stats on their blog – http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/bbcinternet/2012/08/digital_olympics_reach_stream_stats.html