Advanced Television

England vs Iran sets BBC live streaming record

November 22, 2022

By Nik Roseveare

England’s World Cup 2022 opener against Iran on November 21st was streamed a record 8 million times on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport online, making it the largest live streamed event on the BBC over a 24 hour period.

The dominant 6-2 victory for the Three Lions also pulled in a peak TV audience of 8.1 million and over 70 per cent of the share of available viewers.

The tournament’s opening game, Qatar vs Ecuador on November 20th, had a peak audience of 7.9 million on BBC One. By comparison, in 2018, the Peru & Denmark match which started at a similar time had a peak of 6.6 million on the BBC.

Meanwhile, ITV’s coverage of Wales v USA peaked with 13 million viewers tuning in across TV and streaming, to see the draw in their opening group game on the evening of November 21st. The match from kick-off to final whistle was watched by an average of nearly 10 million viewers across TV and streaming. The coverage gave ITV its most watched day so far this year and its best daily share performance since July 2021.  It was the most watched Monday night for more than six years – the highest since England’s Euro 2016 exit against Iceland. ITV also had its biggest day of the year so far for streaming, with 13.4 million streams across the day.

England’s next game is against USA on November 25th at 7pm and will air on ITV.

Figures from UK digital infrastructure provider Openreach suggest that the amount of data used across the Openreach network increased by around 20 per cent (compared to the same period the previous week) as England kicked off their World Cup campaign.

More than 23 Petabytes (Pb) of data was carried across the network between 1pm and 4pm on Monday November21st, compared to 19Pb for the same period, seven days earlier.

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