BBC Olympics streaming stats | Hacker News Reader

BBC Olympics streaming stats

bbc.co.uk

52 pointsrohit8924 comments

Very interesting. I'd love to know how many viewers were using proxy servers to view the Olympics from outside the UK. I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them). They are almost impossible to interpret correctly without great effort.

Because interpretability may not be the key concern, attractiveness might be a more important criteria for the creator.

that's because every executive knows that 3D graphs (especially pie charts!) contain more meaningful information!

Perhaps intelligent people (as opposed to those with some form of OCD) don't need masses of detail for passing items of interest. It just meant to shows a pattern in a quick and accessible fashion. If they wanted to maximise user interpretability they'd just show the raw data in a table.

I'd also love to know why intelligent people insist on using 3D line graphs (and why product designers choose to implement them).

A lot of organizations have graphs and charts designed by visual arts designers without giving their visual artists specific work-related training in accurate, readable data presentation. That's one of the reasons that Edward Tufte has written multiple interesting books and maintains a website

http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/

on visual display of quantitative information. Every intelligent person ought to read one or more of Tufte's books (they are fun and informative enough to reward your time and effort in getting the books) to understand how to avoid "chartjunk" when preparing visual data displays.

A special treat on Tufte's website is "PowerPoint Does Rocket Science--and Better Techniques for Technical Reports,"

http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...

a worthy companion to Peter Norvig's more humorous treatment of PowerPoint in "The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation."

http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/index.htm

I was really hoping for a stat regarding how many streams were sent to datacenter vs consumer IPs. In other words, how many people outside of the UK were watching the feeds by using a proxy or VPN service?

Hmmm... And I'm sure the BBC want to tell the IOC (and the world) that they massively failed to meet their contractual requirements to limit distribution to the territories they have licences for.

Edit: PayUpPal below claims to be BBC employee and says not contractual terms were breached. I would have expected there to be requirements to effectively secure the content to the territories the IOC sold the rights too. Maybe specific security measures were required and applied. Either way indicating massive international access may lead to stricter conditions next time.

Obviously you haven't read the contract. As a BBC employee I can assure you we failed no obligations.

Personally, I think the IOC is missing a trick by not offering to partner up with the BBC and letting people pay, say, 50 gbp, or the equivalent USD or EUR to watch the streams online.

Plenty would pay just to avoid the hassle of setting up and/or the occasional proxy timeouts/pauses.

But you also need to consider the other side of the equation - how much less would be paid by the existing broadcasters if they weren't buying exclusive rights.

The sums may balance one day but I wouldn't bet on it doing so now.

Thanks, that's a very good point, and sadly I think you may be right.

It does make me wonder at what point - if ever in our lifetimes - we'll see global market broadcasting rights being offered. Wonder what the disruption will be that causes it.

For reference, 19 million households have internet access in the UK. The population is about 63 million.

How many people in a household?

And the average household size is about 2.3[1], while the number of people using the internet is about 51 million (82%) [2,3].

[1]: http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/statistics/pdf/11721... [2]: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/material/excel/Indiv... [3]: http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/

Additional reference information.

Connected TV in these stats is probably principally games consoles. At least the PS3 had all the streams.

All 24 streams were available on FTA satellite (Sky, Freesat and general satellite receivers should have been able to get it) and cable although these won't have been captured in these stats. Two of the streams were also available by terrestrial.

Aproximately 11 million homes have satellite (10M Sky and 1M Freesat and other). 4M Virgin cable and maybe 500K using telco IPTV. Terrestrial (Freeview) is the main service in about 10M homes and is used for second TVs in a number more.

There may be some double counting in these figures and they are from memory and it hasn't been my job to know them for over a year.

Looks like iPad/tablet was the "preferred" device for watching olympics (source - http://bbc.in/PdDBtY). If you need some solid data that tablets are going to rule for consuming entertainment then here it is. We are in a major shift of computing and tablets are becoming "default" PCs.

If I was fully concentrating I would have used TV/PS3 in the living room but I used the iPad/iPhone around the house for things I wasn't concentrating fully on.

I may not be typical but the nature (live) and the quantity of content available may be factors exaggerating tablet use compared with a Netflix type service.

I think the BBC underestimated the amount of traffic they'd be doing. I watched a lot of the weightlifting (as that's the sport I participate in) and it paused about every 30 seconds.

And I heard a lot of complaints from other BBC viewers too.

One anecdote deserves another, I watched a lot of it and don't remember any pauses. Perhaps your internet connection or your computer is crap.

I thought so, too. But I was talking to people on IRC all over the world, including in the UK, and they were all saying the same.

It might be related to sport -- more popular sports getting more bandwidth, perhaps?

What I find most interesting is that the second highest trafficked event was in the middle of the UK working day. A lot of employers must have seen some big productivity anomalies during the Olympics.

On the contrary, many believe it improved morale. We had the BBC playing 24 hours a day (working shifts atm) for the Olympics. During the day many of us would break for a few minutes to watch a Team GB athlete, but I definitely found myself not dozing off, as I tend to do when it gets quiet.

What could be an issue is the number of London-based employees who decided to stay away from central London for the duration. Many worked from home or took annual leave, anticipating travel issues.

To put this is perspective, the ALICE experiment produces 2.5GByte/s of data.

on the side note whoever is plotting those graphs needs to do a better job.

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