Super Bowl XLVI Drove Internet Traffic Down As Much As 20%
NBC's Live Stream Was 6.2% of All Downstream U.S. Bandwidth at 9 PM Sunday: Sandvine
By Todd Spangler -- Multichannel News, 2/7/2012 3:50:28 PM
With more than 111 million Americans tuning in to Sunday's Super Bowl on TV, overall Internet usage in the U.S. declined as much as 20% on Feb. 5 compared with an average Sunday, even with NBC's debut of the first legal online video feed of the game, according to a study by network-equipment maker Sandvine.
NBC's free, live online stream of Super Bowl XLVI accounted for 6.2% of all downstream broadband traffic in the U.S. at 9 p.m. Eastern Sunday -- while Netflix's share dropped precipitously during the game, according to Sandvine, which sells equipment for monitoring and managing bandwidth on fixed and mobile networks.
As of press time, NBC had not announced how many Internet streams it served on Super Sunday. It marked the first time the Super Bowl was legally offered online, although the Internet version drew complaints from users about buffering delays and from the fact it didn't provide the same ads as the broadcast TV version or the Madonna-led halftime show.
On TV, Super Bowl XLVI scored as the most-watched TV broadcast in U.S. history, with 111.3 million viewers tuning in to see NBC's telecast of the New York Giants defeating the New England Patriots, according to Nielsen. Sunday's game was the sixth-highest-rated Super Bowl to date.
According to Sandvine's analysis of traffic from a large U.S. wireline broadband provider (which it didn't identify), the TV broadcast inhibited Web usage overall.
"So while there were a significant number of users streaming the game, the vast majority of viewers still went offline and elected to watch it on their big-screen TV," Sandvine vice president of consulting solutions Matt Tooley wrote in a blog post. "In fact so many subscribers did this, the Super Bowl actually created a 'Super Dip' in Internet traffic."
Netflix is normally the biggest source of downstream bandwidth in North America in primetime hours. In the U.S., the service represented 33% of peak downstream usage on fixed broadband networks in September 2011, according to Sandvine. However, on Sunday, Netflix's usage as a share of overall traffic dropped by more than 40% during the game, Sandvine found.
In addition to NBCSports.com, both Facebook and Twitter saw a surge in traffic "as viewers used their PCs and roaming-at-home mobile devices to provide their own commentary online," Tooley wrote.
Indeed, the Super Bowl was the biggest social-media event on record, according to several independent firms. Wiredset's Trendrr tracked 17.5 million social interactions Feb. 5 related to the game and the TV broadcast on Facebook, Twitter and other services, with 51% of the activity from mobile phones. (Disclosure: Trendrr provides the data for Multichannel News' weekly Buzz Meter feature.)
No related content found.
Featured Company
-
Digital Rapids
Digital Rapids is the leading provider of professional hardware and software tools, technology and expertise for bringing video to wider audiences and new viewing platforms. Continuing to set new standards in quality, productivity and versatility, our solutions span the critical ..more
VIEW ALL GALLERIES
