BBC Beats Records For Olympics Traffic On Video, Mobile Surge

We reported last week the BBC’s online services are proving popular for office workers unable to watch live Olympics on the devices formerly known as “televisions”; now there are figures to prove it. The BBC Sport site broke its traffic record last Monday with 4.4 million unique users, BBC Sport director Roger Mosey wrote. Over a million people used the site’s live streaming features on Friday and 110,000 hit the site yesterday for live coverage of Team GB’s latest cycling medal. iPlayer served 700,000 Olympic programmes in the first week of the games.

One step change this year could be mobile – though the BBC sees the medium as immature and is merely experimenting ahead of London 2012, over 400,000 mobile users hit the sport site on Saturday (not just Olympics but also for the first day of the new Premiership season), beating the previous record of 270,000. See our interview with BBC Sport Interactive head Ben Gallop.