Final Olympics numbers

People kept asking me about this on my just completed tour of Asia, so here’s a blog post that’s got the final numbers for the NBCOlympics.com video delivery with Silverlight.

The data is from the Silverlight 2 Customer Evidence and Quote Sheet.

During the 17 days of the games, the site had

• 51.9 million unique visitors (106% more than Athens and Torino combined)
• 1.3 billion page views
• 75.5 million video streams initiated (601% more than Athens and Torino combined)
• 9.9 million hours of video watched (equivalent of 1,126 years of video).
• More than 27 minutes per user average viewing time (compared to 3 minutes for sites using other streaming video technologies)

And these great quotes from Perkins Miller, Senior Vice President, Digital Media, NBC Sports and Olympics:

“NBC had plans to create the most ambitious online video event in history — more than 2,200 hours of Olympic coverage in 25 sports in less than 17 days – with 3,500 hours on demand. NBC needed to ensure the experience was versatile, stable, and — above all — engaging and entertaining.”

NBC Sports chose Silverlight 2 because “with such a vast number of events and hours of live and on-demand video, we needed a scalable, flexible platform that would deliver an immersive and engaging experience.”

Beyond the NBC in the USA, Silverlight was used for Olympics coverage in other countries, including:

• France (FranceTV)
• Netherlands (NOS)
• Russia (Sportbox.ru)
• Italy (RAI)

Silverlight was a great coming-of-age story for Silverlight as we prepared to launch Silverlight 2. The“does Silverlight scale” and “will customers install it” questions have largely gone away in the last couple of months.