World Cup Akamai’s biggest sporting event
July 31, 2014
The 2014 FIFA World Cup Brazil was the largest live sporting event ever delivered in the history of Akamai Technologies, a provider of cloud services. Akamai worked with more than 50 broadcasters to stream live and on-demand video for all 64 matches to an array of connected devices across the world.
Every match of the month-long tournament was streamed to more than 80 countries around the world, making the 2014 World Cup the largest live sporting event that Akamai has ever delivered over its network in terms of total video traffic volume. The Netherlands-Argentina semi-final match on July 9th reached a peak traffic rate of 6.9 Terabits per second (Tbps), the highest of any live sports event delivered by Akamai. Traffic during the July 13th championship match between Germany and Argentina peaked at 6.6 Tbps; and the Germany-Brazil semi-final on July 8th reached 5.8 Tbps and helped generate the highest overall total traffic peak ever recorded on the Akamai Intelligent PlatformTM at 23 Tbps.
More Akamai online video traffic highlights from the 2014 FIFA World Cup include:
– Over the course of the tournament, Tuesday matches saw the highest average peak of 5.1 Tbps, whereas Saturday contests had the lowest at 3 Tbps.
– Weekday matches averaged 4.2 Tbps, compared to the weekend match average of 3.5 Tbps.
– Earlier start times drove higher peaks. 3 p.m. EDT kick-offs peaked at an average of 4.9 Tbps, followed by 12 p.m. (3.9 Tbps), 4 p.m. (3.4 Tbps), 6 p.m. (2.2 Tbps) and 9 p.m. (1.8 Tbps).
– The German national team drove the highest average traffic peak at 5.1 Tbps, followed by Portugal (4.9 Tbps), the U.S. (4.8 Tbps) and Ghana (4.5 Tbps). The four teams also comprised the “Group of Death,” which drove the highest average peak of all FIFA World Cup groups in the first round.
– South Korea and Japan tied for the lowest average peak at 1.8 Tbps each. They were slightly behind Ecuador and Russia’s 1.9 Tbps.