Mobile TV a Strong Presence at London Olympics
Mobile TV broadcasters will been licking their collective lips with recent figures showing that a more than modest percentage of the London Olympics viewership is coming from portable devices.
American broadcaster NBC is claiming 28 million people have visited NBCOlympics.com, which is an eight percent increase from the 2008 Beijing Games. Even more impressively 64 million total video streams are being served across all platforms – a staggering 182 percent increase over Beijing.
The really telling stat is 60 percent of video streams are happening “online” (ie. desktop web), with 45 percent coming from a combination of tablet and smartphones. In a very turbulent market this is one of the first examples of consumers integrating mobile TV into a social norm for daily routine.
In the UK, the BBC has revealed that the BBC iPlayer garnered over 1.7 million requests for the Olympic opening ceremony, with companies now banning employees from watching the Olympics at work, such is the demand for the event.
Alan Wurtzel, NBC’s president of research and development stated the demand for London 2012 ‘on the go’ was a sign that mobile TV was becoming prominent at last:
Sixty percent of Americans don’t even work in an office - a lot of those folks are going to be watching on mobile for the first time”.
The London Olympics will climax on the 12th August 2012.
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