The Open began yesterday and we noticed a big increase in traffic coming from iPlayer in the morning and afternoon. The BBC website is streaming live coverage of The Open (using the same technology as iPlayer) so it’s natural to assume that the majority of that increase in traffic is from people watching the golf.

What’s interesting about it is that a massive chunk of that usage is coming from business accounts. On a normal weekday between business hours of 9am to 6pm we’d normally expect to see around 500 to 600GB of streaming (downloads only) but yesterday we saw double the normal amount with 1,196GB of streaming during office hours.

That beat the previous record of 904GB set on 30th June (which was the middle of Wimbledon fortnight and the day of Andy Murray beating Richard Gasquet).

We’re already seeing similar volumes of streaming today, although expect it to go back towards more normal levels over the weekend as most people are going to be watching it on the TV rather than the Internet.

Big question is though, is this having any effect on productivity? We have to wonder…

Dave Tomlinson
PlusNet Product Team

Bookmark to:

This entry was posted by Dave Tomlinson on Friday, July 18th, 2008 at 5:40 pm and is tagged with iPlayer, Traffic Management and is posted in the category Traffic Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.