BBC received record-breaking live stream requests during London Olympics

London, Aug 14(ANI): The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) has revealed that the London Olympics drew a larger web audience in one day than the whole of the 2010 football World Cup, smashing every previous online records in the process.

On the busiest day, it served up 2.8 petabytes of sporting action, which is the equivalent of 700,000 DVDs full of information.

Bradley Wiggins' performance in the men's cycling time trial on the morning of Wednesday 1 August placed the biggest demand on the BBC's streaming infrastructure.

During the event traffic peaked at 700Gbits per second, as office workers tuned in online to see Team GB's medal chase gather pace.

The most popular live stream overall carried both the tennis singles finals on the middle Sunday. Viewers requested online coverage of the finals 820,000 times.

There were only two athletics live streams, which made it into the top ten, and they featured morning heats involving Jessica Ennis and Usain Bolt, as viewers moved from online to broadcast television for the big evening showdowns.

"While PC and tablet usage has generally peaked and dipped at different times of the day, mobile consumption has increased steadily from the morning to a plateau in the early afternoon, before dipping away in conjunction with TV viewing in the evening," The Telegraph quoted Cait O'Riordan, a senior BBC's online sport executive, as saying.

In total, the BBC received 102 million requests for live streams, catch-up coverage and clips online throughout the Games, which is almost three times the previous record of 38 million, set during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa.

The most popular clip, requested 830,000 times, was the spectacular "back flop" by the German diver Steven Feck, which has also attracted millions of views on YouTube. (ANI)