BBC Boosted By GB Olympic Success
The string of medal-winning performances by the British Olympic team during the Beijing Games has produced impressive viewing figures for host broadcaster the BBC with 36.6m people having tuned in to the Games.
The audience, which equates to 64.6&#xof; the UK viewing public, has currently tuned in to watch at least 15 minutes of Olympic coverage since the beginning of the Games on Friday 8th August.
Viewing peaked at 15.30 on Saturday 16 August as 5.8m watched Usain Bolt break the world record in the 100m final to take Gold.
Team GB’s ‘Golden Weekend’ (16th and 17th August) alone was watched by 23.7m (41.7% of the viewing public) with 2m staying up until 1am to watch Paula Radcliffe in the marathon and 0.5m watching Becky Adlington take her second gold in the pool at 3am.
The audiences have not just been limited to television coverage – on Monday 11th August, 4.4m unique users watched the Games on BBC Sport Online, the highest ever daily audience in the broadcaster’s history beating the previous best of 3.9m.
This weekend also saw record usage of BBC Sport Online live video with 2,999,286 page impressions on Saturday 16th August – an increase of over 2m on the previous record set on the day of the Opening Ceremony on 8th August – and 2,416,629 pages on Sunday 17th August. These pages were viewed by approximately 870,000 unique users on each day of the weekend.
Among other online highlights, the weekend of the 16th and 17th August was comfortably a record weekend for BBC Sport Online, with 3.3m unique users on both Saturday and Sunday, 1m more than the average weekend figures.
The BBC’s mobile content including the combination of Olympics and football gave the broadcaster a new record of 400,000 unique users beating the previous best of 270,000.
