Olympic opener tops iPlayer as mobile viewing skyrockets

iPlayer viewer numbers were higher than ever in 2012, the BBC boasts, with a huge boost in traffic coming from smart phone and tablet owners.

The London 2012 Olympic opening ceremony was the most-viewed programme last year, pulling in a whopping 3.3 million pairs of eyeballs. Smug car-a-thon Top Gear was a close second with 2.8 million views, while angular national treasure Benedict Cumberbatch attracted 2.5 million streams with Sherlock.

Divulging the stats behind its streaming service, the Beeb says it witnessed a 177 per cent jump in the number of viewers using smart phones and tablets -- a quarter of iPlayer's total streams.

36.5 billion minutes of programming were transmitted through iPlayer, the BBC says, with a total of 2.32 billion TV and radio programme requests. 

iPlayer recently added the ability to download programmes to your mobile gadget for offline viewing -- if you're using an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad that is. The experiment seems to have worked, as 10.8 million shows were downloaded to Apple's shiny devices following the launch of downloadable programmes in September.

That's tooth-grinding news for Android fans, who have been waiting not-so-patiently for the offline-viewing feature to arrive on Google's platform. Last year I spoke to iPlayer big cheese Daniel Danker, who cited fragmentation -- the issue that there are too many screen sizes, pixel resolutions and processor types to make Android development easy -- as one reason fans had been left waiting.

[Source: CNET]

YouTube And The Olympics: 231M Video Streams And Up To 500K Concurrent Viewers

The less said about the quality of NBC’s Olympics coverage in the U.S., the better, but in terms of the quantity of live and recorded Olympics video streamed this year, the partnership between NBC and YouTube clearly worked out well. Even by YouTube’s standards, live streaming the Olympics for NBC was a pretty massive undertaking and the company just released new data about its Olympics coverage from earlier this month. At its peak, the service pushed out more than half a million livestreams at the same time. On NBCOlympics.com, YouTube says, viewers watched more than 159 million total streams and just over a third of these came from mobile devices and more than 50% were in HD.

In total, YouTube says, its users across the U.S. and 64 countries in Africa and Asia watched a total of 231 million video streams. The IOC’s YouTube Channel alone was responsible for 72 million of these and the “Team USA” U.S. Olympic Committee Channel registered more than 6.75 million views (though most of these views seem to have come from a few select videos and quite a few of the “Team USA” uploads currently have fewer than 1,000 views).

According to YouTube, the quality of the live video was also “better than ever before, with a 7X improvement in quality based on low buffering and high frame rates.” YouTube doesn’t say what exactly it is comparing this year’s numbers to, so it’s probably a good idea to take this number with a grain of salt..

[Source: TechCrunch]

After ‘Genius’ Fail, Apple Back to Promoting iPad in Olympics

Apple, which discontinued its much-panned “genius” ads during the Olympics after their short run, is back with a more traditional approach, promoting its latest iPad.  The ad above, which ran during Tuesday night’s Olympics telecast on NBC, touts the new iPad’s Retina display and the ability to tweet articles you like. The “product-as-hero” style of the TV spot is more in keeping with past Apple ads than the three “genius” spots, which put the brand’s Apple Store VIPs in the spotlight. In contrast with “Genius,” which divided fans, the latest spot seems to be gaining wider acceptance — with more than 26,000 views, the new ad has 10 times more likes than dislikes.  However, the creative retreat by Apple is uncharacteristic. The brand rarely kowtows to fans and a tacit admission that the previous ads weren’t working is a rare occurrence for a brand known for its uncompromising vision and untouchable marketing prowess.  What do you think? Do you like the latest ads? Were the genius ads unfairly maligned? Sound off in the comments.

[Source: Mashable]

BBC shows off 33-megapixel Super Hi-Vision Olympic footage

The first live Super Hi-Vision broadcast for public consumption was of the Olympic opening ceremony in London last week. We didn't get to see that premiere, or the second or third screenings either -- but the fourth? Oh yes. We grabbed a seat right up front of a small theater inside BBC Broadcasting House, watched a live 33-megapixel feed from the Aquatics Center and absorbed some very fond memories in the process. At the same time, a question hung over the footage like a watermark: why bother? The world is barely getting to grips with the notion of 4K, so why did the BBC and Japanese broadcaster NHK go to the expense of sending a dedicated SHV video truck, a 22.2-channel SHV audio truck, and the world's only three 8K Ultra HDTV cameras to London? Fortunately, we caught up with someone in charge who was able to respond to that question. Read on for what they said, plus a slightly fuller sense of what the footage was like to watch.

[Source: To read the full article visit Engadget]

London bans wireless access points at Olympics

If you thought the list of banned items at the Olympic Games couldn't get any longer, now the IOC is gunning for that mobile hotspot in your pocket. The prohibited list includes all of the things you'd expect (weapons, alcohol, toxic materials) but also this:  "Personal / private wireless access points and 3G hubs (smart devices such as Android phones, iPhone and tablets are permitted inside venues, but must not be used as wireless points to connect multiple devices)" Probably best to leave that router at home and make sure you only activate your smartphone's hotspot when you're hidden in a crowd, folks.

[Source: Engadget]