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Thursday, June 24, 2010

World Cup and the Internet

A peak of 14million UK viewers (according to BARB, they can't count mass audiences in pubs, the 100,000 watching at Glastonbury's festival Pyramid stage etc. so add a million) watched England hang on against the mighty Slovenes yesterday afternoon - presumably the highest workday audience of all time? It was lower than the evening 17.7million versus nailed-on-guaranteed semi-finalists USA or the 19million versus pretty-but-scoreless Algeria.
More pertinent, the BBC was serving a record 800,000 concurrent UK streams on iPlayer - I 'enjoyed' it on SuperJANET and it was pretty superb quality with almost no jitter on that Gigabit network. That more than doubled the BBC's previous record and must have put a hell of a strain on the content delivery network and not a few office networks - but of course the wholesale ISP networks suffered: "Demon says there was a 55% increase in internet traffic during the match, while Easynet put the spike in traffic at kick-off at 226%."
Regular readers will note that Paraguay and its mobile surfers are playing the surprise package of New Zealand's 'All-Whites' this afternoon. This blog as Paraguay supporters predicts a dull 0-0 or a 1-0 Paraguay win and they will sail into the last-16.

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