Youtube: 231 million total olympic streams, 500k+ livestreams at peak

Say what you want about the coverage of the 2012 London Olympics in the States (and I’m sure you have a lot to say), but YouTube and NBC’s partnership accounted for a lot of streaming hours over the two+ weeks.

Today, YouTube has released their statistics for the Olympic Games coverage and the immediately eye-popping number is 231 million total streams (worldwide, including the U.S. and 64 other countries). YouTube says that out of those 231 million, 72 million come directly from the IOC YouTube channel.

At one single time, YouTube says that they had over 500,000 livestreams going at the same time.

That aforementioned partnership with NBC (YouTube powered NBCOlympics.com) saw over 159 million streams.

And it wasn’t just live streaming video that saw a spike in views. The TeamUSA channels saw 6.75 million views of their behind the scenes coverage.

Youtube also talks about a 7X improvement in quality “based on low buffering and high frame rates” for live video. I’m not sure that I noticed that much of a difference between Olympic streams and other streaming content on the site, but I guess I’ll take their word for it.

Facebook and Twitter also released their own Olympic Games stats. Facebook says users generated over 116 million Olympic-themed communications, while Twitter announced more than 150 million Olympic-themed tweets.

Sources: http://www.webpronews.com/