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Akamai streams 29.3bn minutes of World Cup

July 18, 2018

The 2018 World Cup was the most-streamed sporting event ever, by volume of data, on the Akamai platform.

France not only took home the trophy in Russia, they also won the most-streamed game. The highest traffic peak on the Akamai platform during a single game of the tournament was during the semi-final between France and Belgium, during which bandwidth reached 22.52Tbps.  To put that in context, four years ago, the peak in Brazil was 6.88Tbps. The France-Croatia final drove the second-highest bandwidth peak of the tournament at 20.66Tbps.

In all, 2.7 times as much data was streamed in Russia than was streamed in Brazil in 2014 and 2.3 times as much as in Rio for the athletics in 2016 – making it the most-streamed sporting tournament, by volume, on the Akamai platform to date. The number of minutes of footage streamed also vastly increased from Brazil to Russia. From start to finish, 29.3 billion minutes of football action were streamed from Russia, a 63 per cent uplift on Brazil.

The Russian tournament drew unprecedented audiences for international football streaming, with the final match driving 7.9 million concurrent streams. The peak in the tournament was during group stage, where two games (Mexico-Sweden and South Korea-Germany) took place at the same time and achieved 9.7 million concurrent streams. This compares to a viewing peak of 5 million for the tournament in Brazil, which also occurred when two games were played at the same time (US-Germany and Portugal-Ghana).

Overall, peak bandwidth requirements for video streaming for the Russian football far exceeded the matches in Brazil.  In fact, 92 per cent of the games played in Russia topped out higher than the peak for the most-streamed match in Brazil. When the peak bandwidth numbers hit in every game of the tournaments are compared side by side, the average (median) peak in Russia was 10.54Tbps, more than tripling the median peak in Brazil of 3.29Tbps.

Akamai supported 55 broadcasters worldwide to stream the event from Russia.

How does this compare to other events?

  • After two days, Akamai had delivered more data than it did in total from the South Africa event in 2010
  • After three days, Akamai had delivered more data than it did in total from the whole of the London event in 2012
  • After four days, Akamai had delivered more data than it did in total from the whole of the Sochi event in 2014
  • After ten days, Akamai had delivered more data than it did in total from the whole of the Brazil event in 2014
  • After 11 days, Akamai had delivered more data than it did in total from the whole of the Rio event in 2016

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