Wrestlemania 32 sets streaming records
April 8, 2016
On April 3rd 107,000 fans gathered at Texas Stadium in Dallas to watch WrestleMania 32. According to Rolling Stone magazine, there were 413 minutes of total air time covering all the activities in the ring, in the stadium and backstage. In another metric, AT&T reported Wrestlemania 32 set new records of data use at the stadium with total traffic reaching 8.6TB. Furthermore, AT&T said the WWE event on Sunday drove 36 per cent more data traffic than the NCAA Football Championship game at the same venue.
The real story according to Qwilt, which unfolds outside of Texas Stadium and around the world, may be the phenomenal success of the WWE network which now reports 1.1 million US paid subscribers and 345,000 international paid subscribers as of April 3th. And during WWE Wrestlemania 32, the WWE Network subscribers consumed a massive amount of streaming data while watching the event. Though the total WWE Network subscribers is only 1.4 million, on April 3th, the WWE Network traffic ranked, in some US networks, second only to Netflix in terms of streaming volume. Keep in mind Netflix reported 75 million worldwide subscribers in January, 2016. In other US networks, WWE Live traffic ranked 3rd, behind Netflix and Amazon. To put this into perspective, on most nights, WWE Live traffic does not rank among even the top 20 online video streaming sites.
Based on Qwilt online video analytics data from a US cable operator network, WWE Live ranked 3rd, behind Netflix and Amazon, and ahead of Hulu among online video streaming sites using HTTP streaming. In a second ranking, from a US University, WWE Live ranks second, behind only Netflix and ahead of Hulu.
As additional perspective, see the comparison below which shows the total traffic from WWE’s Roadblock event on March 12th which was held at Ricoh Coliseum in Toronto. Total traffic, as measured in one Open Cache Node in a US cable operator network, consumed by those WWE Network subscribers live streaming this event was 173 GB.
Compare this with the total traffic consumed by WWE Live Network subscribers from the same Open Caching Node in the same service provider network on April 3rd during WWE Wrestlemania 32 in Dallas. The total traffic consumed increased by a factor of 6.3X to 1.1 TB. An extraordinary increase in less than one month – between March 12th and April 3rd – for WWE events.