London Olympics: Heavy Mobile Traffic for Canadian Coverage

Five times higher than usual in first week of coverage

By George Winslow -- Broadcasting & Cable, 8/3/2012 2:32:04 PM

With NBC reporting record digital traffic for its online and mobile coverage of the Olympics in the U.S., the 2012 London Games also seem to be living up to expectations as the first big digital Olympics in other markets as well. The Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium reported Friday that its Web sites have seen nearly 90 million page views and that mobile is accounting for 61% of the traffic, five times more than usual.

Downloads of the CTV Olympics London 2012 and RDS olympiques pour Londres 2012 apps are also approaching the 1 million mark, a huge number for a country that has fewer than 35 million residents.

"The mobile traffic is staggering," said Mark Silver, Head of Digital, Canada's Olympic Broadcast Media Consortium, a joint venture between CTV (with a 80% interest) and Rogers Media Inc. (with 20% interest) that is providing the on-air and digital coverage. "Live sports trend toward mobile access, however, to have audiences engage with us via mobile platforms in such great numbers lets us know that these Games are really important to Canadians, and that they are staying with us for the action throughout the day."

Overall the Consortium is providing a record amount of digital coverage, with over 3,500 hours on a variety of online, mobile and other platforms.

The Consortium is also reporting strong interest in à la carte purchases of its coverage, with downloads of Bell Media programs on iTunes have increased 690% over the previous week.

Traffic is also up from the 2010 Vancouver Games, which were particularly popular in Canada because they were located in the country.

CTVOlympics.ca and RDSolympiques.ca have seen growth in page views, up 10% over the same time period during Vancouver 2010. About 25% of all video views, which total more than 10 million for the sites, were of live video streams.

Users were also active on social media. During the first seven days of coverage there were more than 70,000 brand interactions on social networks and almost one million clicks into the online Social Scene that accompanies live streams and live broadcast television. The 25-34 and 35-44 demo dominated the usage.