This summer’s Euro 2020 football championship hit more streams and hours than Tokyo 2020 according to Akamai.
Peak streaming traffic for the Euro 2020 matches hit 35 Tbps, on 11th July during the final between Italy and England, more than three times the peak traffic of 10 Tbps on 7th August for the Olympics, according to a blog post by Cory Sakakeeny, the principal lead technical project manager at Akamai.
UEFA Euro 2020 also beat the Olympics in terms of total streaming hours, though by a much tighter margin with 578 million total streaming hours compared to about 500 million hours from Tokyo on the Akamai platform.
Sakakenny’s blog noted that the last full day of competition during the games in Tokyo generated the highest video streaming traffic for 30-plus customers on the Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform, with peak 10 Tbps traffic on Saturday, 7th August.
That’s more than double the 4.5 Tbps peak Akamai observed during the Games in Rio in 2016. “Average peak traffic for the full event in Tokyo was 8.3 Tbps compared with 3 Tbps for the full event in Rio,” Sakakeeny reported. “In total, Akamai streamed 500 million hours of video from Tokyo for our customers. That’s more than double the 234 million hours of video delivered from Rio.”
Sakakeeny explained the difference in peak traffic for the Euros, which hit a traffic peak of 35 Tbps on Akamai and averaged 17.5 Tbps across every match, by noting that “it boils down to audience concentration. The matches made for appointment viewing, typically 90-minute competitions that rarely played out over more than a 2-hour window. Compare that with Tokyo, which consisted of many different competitions taking place all day, every day. While the peak from Europe was more than triple Tokyo’s, the number of total streaming hours from Europe (578 million) was just less than 1.2x the 500 million hours from Tokyo.”
