How Big Were the Winter Olympics Online?

The recently concluded Winter Olympics that were held in Vancouver, Canada are latest sign that user behavior is increasingly shifting towards online video. Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based content delivery network with a global footprint, helped collect some of the stats about the Vancouver Olympics and they are truly mind-boggling. NBCOlympics.com clocked 710 million page views and 46 million unique visits. In addition, NBC Olympics Mobile served up 82 million page views and 1.9 million mobile video streams. But those numbers were a small part of the overall picture.

• Akamai delivered more than 5,000 hours of live and on-demand video over 17 days and at peak, served more than 30 concurrent live-streaming events.
• At its peak, Akamai was streaming close to 374 Gbps of video.
• The company delivered more than 12 Petabytes (12,000 TBs) across its Olympics customers. To put that in perspective, the Internet archive has over 3 petabytes of data.
• On Feb. 28, at its peak, Akamai served up about 2.4 million pages per second, with the majority of traffic coming from North America, followed by Europe. This could be explained by the USA v. Canada ice hockey finals and the closing ceremony.