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..