World Cup Streaming Numbers Show Online Video Not Replacing TV

Dan Rayburn | Friday July 16, 2010 | 03:18 PM | Comments (2)

Today, Akamai released details on the number of streams they served for 24 global broadcasters into 65 countries during the World Cup. While traffic to World Cup websites saw a lot of growth from previous years, the number of actual video viewers for the live games peaked at only 1.6M simultaneous streams. Although many in the industry want to proclaim that online video is going to replace TV or become the new medium for viewing video in large numbers, as we saw with the World Cup, that clearly did not happen.

Compared to the Obama inauguration, where Akamai peaked at 3.6M simultaneous viewers, the World Cup was small in size. Akamai wasn't the only CDN to deliver live streams of the World Cup, but they were the largest. So even if you add in the number of simultaneous streams the other CDNs served, the total number of overall viewers watching World Cup games at any give time shows online video isn't displacing TV anytime soon.

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