4 ms·

BBC Olympics streaming stats

52 points by rohit89 14y ago

mythealias 14y ago
on the side note whoever is plotting those graphs needs to do a better job.
waterlesscloud 14y ago
For reference, 19 million households have internet access in the UK. The population is about 63 million.
- benblack86 14y ago
  How many people in a household?
- dbaupp 14y ago
  And the average household size is about 2.3[1], while the number of people using the internet is about 51 million (82%) [2,3]. [1]: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/statistics/pdf/1172133.pdf http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/statistics/pdf/11721... [2]: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/material/excel/Individuals%20using%20the%20Internet2000-2011.xls http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/material/excel/Indiv... [3]: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/
- josephlord 14y ago
  Additional reference information. Connected TV in these stats is probably principally games consoles. At least the PS3 had all the streams. All 24 streams were available on FTA satellite (Sky, Freesat and general satellite receivers should have been able to get it) and cable although these won't have been captured in these stats. Two of the streams were also available by terrestrial. Aproximately 11 million homes have satellite (10M Sky and 1M Freesat and other). 4M Virgin cable and maybe 500K using telco IPTV. Terrestrial (Freeview) is the main service in about 10M homes and is used for second TVs in a number more. There may be some double counting in these figures and they are from memory and it hasn't been my job to know them for over a year.
lusr 14y ago
Very interesting. I'd love to know how many viewers were using proxy servers to view the Olympics from outside the UK. I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them). They are almost impossible to interpret correctly without great effort.
- ig1 14y ago
  Because interpretability may not be the key concern, attractiveness might be a more important criteria for the creator.
- draz 14y ago
  that's because every executive knows that 3D graphs (especially pie charts!) contain more meaningful information!
- epo 14y ago
  Perhaps intelligent people (as opposed to those with some form of OCD) don't need masses of detail for passing items of interest. It just meant to shows a pattern in a quick and accessible fashion. If they wanted to maximise user interpretability they'd just show the raw data in a table.
- tokenadult 14y ago
  I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them). A lot of organizations have graphs and charts designed by visual arts designers without giving their visual artists specific work-related training in accurate, readable data presentation. That's one of the reasons that Edward Tufte has written multiple interesting books and maintains a website http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ on visual display of quantitative information. Every intelligent person ought to read one or more of Tufte's books (they are fun and informative enough to reward your time and effort in getting the books) to understand how to avoid "chartjunk" when preparing visual data displays. A special treat on Tufte's website is "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports," http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... a worthy companion to Peter Norvig's more humorous treatment of PowerPoint in "The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation." http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm
mbell 14y ago
I was really hoping for a stat regarding how many streams were sent to datacenter vs consumer IPs. In other words, how many people outside of the UK were watching the feeds by using a proxy or VPN service?
- josephlord 14y ago
  Hmmm... And I'm sure the BBC want to tell the IOC (and the world) that they massively failed to meet their contractual requirements to limit distribution to the territories they have licences for. Edit: PayUpPal below claims to be BBC employee and says not contractual terms were breached. I would have expected there to be requirements to effectively secure the content to the territories the IOC sold the rights too. Maybe specific security measures were required and applied. Either way indicating massive international access may lead to stricter conditions next time.
  - PayUpPal 14y ago
    Obviously you haven't read the contract. As a BBC employee I can assure you we failed no obligations.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - mootothemax 14y ago
    Personally, I think the IOC is missing a trick by not offering to partner up with the BBC and letting people pay, say, 50 gbp, or the equivalent USD or EUR to watch the streams online. Plenty would pay just to avoid the hassle of setting up and/or the occasional proxy timeouts/pauses.
    - josephlord 14y ago
      But you also need to consider the other side of the equation - how much less would be paid by the existing broadcasters if they weren't buying exclusive rights. The sums may balance one day but I wouldn't bet on it doing so now.
onehp 14y ago
What I find most interesting is that the second highest trafficked event was in the middle of the UK working day. A lot of employers must have seen some big productivity anomalies during the Olympics.
- RossM 14y ago
  On the contrary, many believe it improved morale. We had the BBC playing 24 hours a day (working shifts atm) for the Olympics. During the day many of us would break for a few minutes to watch a Team GB athlete, but I definitely found myself not dozing off, as I tend to do when it gets quiet. What could be an issue is the number of London-based employees who decided to stay away from central London for the duration. Many worked from home or took annual leave, anticipating travel issues.
dm8 14y ago
Looks like iPad/tablet was the "preferred" device for watching olympics (source - http://bbc.in/PdDBtY http://bbc.in/PdDBtY). If you need some solid data that tablets are going to rule for consuming entertainment then here it is. We are in a major shift of computing and tablets are becoming "default" PCs.
- josephlord 14y ago
  If I was fully concentrating I would have used TV/PS3 in the living room but I used the iPad/iPhone around the house for things I wasn't concentrating fully on. I may not be typical but the nature (live) and the quantity of content available may be factors exaggerating tablet use compared with a Netflix type service.
jacques_chester 14y ago
I think the BBC underestimated the amount of traffic they'd be doing. I watched a lot of the weightlifting (as that's the sport I participate in) and it paused about every 30 seconds. And I heard a lot of complaints from other BBC viewers too.
- epo 14y ago
  One anecdote deserves another, I watched a lot of it and don't remember any pauses. Perhaps your internet connection or your computer is crap.
  - jacques_chester 14y ago
    I thought so, too. But I was talking to people on IRC all over the world, including in the UK, and they were all saying the same. It might be related to sport -- more popular sports getting more bandwidth, perhaps?
mmcnickle 14y ago
To put this is perspective, the ALICE experiment produces 2.5GByte/s of data.

52 points by rohit89 14y ago

mythealias 14y ago

on the side note whoever is plotting those graphs needs to do a better job.

waterlesscloud 14y ago

For reference, 19 million households have internet access in the UK. The population is about 63 million.

benblack86 14y ago
How many people in a household?
dbaupp 14y ago
And the average household size is about 2.3[1], while the number of people using the internet is about 51 million (82%) [2,3]. [1]: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/statistics/pdf/1172133.pdf http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/statistics/pdf/11721... [2]: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/material/excel/Individuals%20using%20the%20Internet2000-2011.xls http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/material/excel/Indiv... [3]: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/ http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/
josephlord 14y ago
Additional reference information. Connected TV in these stats is probably principally games consoles. At least the PS3 had all the streams. All 24 streams were available on FTA satellite (Sky, Freesat and general satellite receivers should have been able to get it) and cable although these won't have been captured in these stats. Two of the streams were also available by terrestrial. Aproximately 11 million homes have satellite (10M Sky and 1M Freesat and other). 4M Virgin cable and maybe 500K using telco IPTV. Terrestrial (Freeview) is the main service in about 10M homes and is used for second TVs in a number more. There may be some double counting in these figures and they are from memory and it hasn't been my job to know them for over a year.

lusr 14y ago

Very interesting. I'd love to know how many viewers were using proxy servers to view the Olympics from outside the UK. I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them). They are almost impossible to interpret correctly without great effort.

ig1 14y ago
Because interpretability may not be the key concern, attractiveness might be a more important criteria for the creator.
draz 14y ago
that's because every executive knows that 3D graphs (especially pie charts!) contain more meaningful information!
epo 14y ago
Perhaps intelligent people (as opposed to those with some form of OCD) don't need masses of detail for passing items of interest. It just meant to shows a pattern in a quick and accessible fashion. If they wanted to maximise user interpretability they'd just show the raw data in a table.
tokenadult 14y ago
I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them). A lot of organizations have graphs and charts designed by visual arts designers without giving their visual artists specific work-related training in accurate, readable data presentation. That's one of the reasons that Edward Tufte has written multiple interesting books and maintains a website http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ on visual display of quantitative information. Every intelligent person ought to read one or more of Tufte's books (they are fun and informative enough to reward your time and effort in getting the books) to understand how to avoid "chartjunk" when preparing visual data displays. A special treat on Tufte's website is "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports," http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0001yB&topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0... a worthy companion to Peter Norvig's more humorous treatment of PowerPoint in "The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation." http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

mbell 14y ago

I was really hoping for a stat regarding how many streams were sent to datacenter vs consumer IPs. In other words, how many people outside of the UK were watching the feeds by using a proxy or VPN service?

josephlord 14y ago
Hmmm... And I'm sure the BBC want to tell the IOC (and the world) that they massively failed to meet their contractual requirements to limit distribution to the territories they have licences for. Edit: PayUpPal below claims to be BBC employee and says not contractual terms were breached. I would have expected there to be requirements to effectively secure the content to the territories the IOC sold the rights too. Maybe specific security measures were required and applied. Either way indicating massive international access may lead to stricter conditions next time.
- PayUpPal 14y ago
  Obviously you haven't read the contract. As a BBC employee I can assure you we failed no obligations.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- mootothemax 14y ago
  Personally, I think the IOC is missing a trick by not offering to partner up with the BBC and letting people pay, say, 50 gbp, or the equivalent USD or EUR to watch the streams online. Plenty would pay just to avoid the hassle of setting up and/or the occasional proxy timeouts/pauses.
  - josephlord 14y ago
    But you also need to consider the other side of the equation - how much less would be paid by the existing broadcasters if they weren't buying exclusive rights. The sums may balance one day but I wouldn't bet on it doing so now.

onehp 14y ago

What I find most interesting is that the second highest trafficked event was in the middle of the UK working day. A lot of employers must have seen some big productivity anomalies during the Olympics.

RossM 14y ago
On the contrary, many believe it improved morale. We had the BBC playing 24 hours a day (working shifts atm) for the Olympics. During the day many of us would break for a few minutes to watch a Team GB athlete, but I definitely found myself not dozing off, as I tend to do when it gets quiet. What could be an issue is the number of London-based employees who decided to stay away from central London for the duration. Many worked from home or took annual leave, anticipating travel issues.

dm8 14y ago

Looks like iPad/tablet was the "preferred" device for watching olympics (source - http://bbc.in/PdDBtY http://bbc.in/PdDBtY). If you need some solid data that tablets are going to rule for consuming entertainment then here it is. We are in a major shift of computing and tablets are becoming "default" PCs.

josephlord 14y ago
If I was fully concentrating I would have used TV/PS3 in the living room but I used the iPad/iPhone around the house for things I wasn't concentrating fully on. I may not be typical but the nature (live) and the quantity of content available may be factors exaggerating tablet use compared with a Netflix type service.

jacques_chester 14y ago

I think the BBC underestimated the amount of traffic they'd be doing. I watched a lot of the weightlifting (as that's the sport I participate in) and it paused about every 30 seconds. And I heard a lot of complaints from other BBC viewers too.

epo 14y ago
One anecdote deserves another, I watched a lot of it and don't remember any pauses. Perhaps your internet connection or your computer is crap.
- jacques_chester 14y ago
  I thought so, too. But I was talking to people on IRC all over the world, including in the UK, and they were all saying the same. It might be related to sport -- more popular sports getting more bandwidth, perhaps?

mmcnickle 14y ago

To put this is perspective, the ALICE experiment produces 2.5GByte/s of data.