Akamai Details World Cup Coverage

July 16th, 2010 by · 7 Comments

You had to know that Akamai (NASDAQ:AKAM, news, filings) was handling a big pile of World Cup traffic, considering their dominant position in the content delivery sector.  But until today’s announcement, we didn’t know too many details.  Akamai handled streaming for some 24 global broadcasters into 65 countries, with key major customers including ESPN, Prisacom, Televisa, TV2 and TV4.

At its peak, Akamai delivered some 1.6M concurrent streams for the competition.  Interest overall doubled since the 2006 event.  Or perhaps more accurately, people used the internet twice as much to keep up with the World Cup than last time, with much of that coming at the expense of traditional sources such as television.  On ESPN3.com, matches were viewed by 7.4 million unique viewers.

The largest draw this time?  U.S. vs. Algeria and England vs. Slovenia.  Hmmm, apparently Americans were actually keeping track of their soccer team this year, since I don’t think the Algerian audience is large enough to move that needle ahead of, say, the finals…

I can’t quite figure out one bit of the PR though.  Akamai said that their Net Usage Index for News peaked during Italy vs Slovenia.  But Italy didn’t play Slovenia, they were in different groups and neither made it out of group play…  Italy vs Slovakia perhaps?  Or England vs Slovenia?  [EDIT:  Akamai is correcting the PR, the correct game was Italy vs Slovakia]

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Categories: Content Distribution · Internet Traffic

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