The London Olympics have officially become the on-the-go Games.
Canada’s Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium announced Friday that mobile viewing accounted for more than 60% of the traffic to its various digital platforms during the Games’ first week. That is more than five times the typical average for Bell Media’s properties, which typically derive 12% of their traffic from mobile devices.
The Consortium’s digital platforms, which include CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca as well as English and French-language apps, have garnered nearly 90 million page views since the Olympics began last week. The apps have been downloaded nearly one million times.
The numbers indicate what the Consortium termed an “enthusiastic shift” in consumer behaviour.
Mark Silver, head of digital for the Consortium, called the mobile traffic “staggering.” While Silver said that live sports tend to align with mobile viewing, the Olympic numbers suggest Canadians are staying with the Consortium throughout the day.
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The Consortium is among the few broadcasters to make its coverage of the London Games available for download on an a la carte basis. The Consortium said that downloads of Bell Media programs on iTunes have increased 690% over the week prior to the Games. The Games’ opening ceremonies is currently the third most downloaded show on iTunes, according to the Consortium, with other Olympic events ranking in the top 20.
Page views to the CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca sites are also up significantly over the 2010 Vancouver Games. Traffic to the sites peaks between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. EST, with live video streams accounting for a quarter of all video views, more than 10 million combined.
The Consortium said there have been more than 70,000 brand interactions on social networks—which it defines as people directing comments on social media specifically towards the organization—and almost one million clicks into the online “Social Scene” that accompanies live streams and live TV broadcasts.
U.S. broadcaster NBC also announced today that it has served up more than 75 million video streams across its online, mobile and tablet platforms, including 34 million live streams (already surpassing the broadcaster’s total for the Beijing Games), plus 744 million page views.
A total of 9.6 million hours of video has already been streamed to NBC properties, a 182% increase over the amount of video streamed during the first week of the Beijing Games. NBC also said that its Olympic apps (NBC Olympics Live Extra and NBC Olympics) have been downloaded more than six million times.
