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Akamai: World Cup the most-streamed sporting event ever

France won the most-streamed match of the tournament as well as becoming world champions

This year’s FIFA World Cup was the most-streamed sporting tournament by volume of data in Akamai’s history.

Overall, 2.7 times as much data was streamed in Russia than was streamed in Brazil in 2014 and 2.3 times as much as in Rio for the Olympics in 2016 – making it the most-streamed sporting tournament, by volume, on the Akamai platform to date.

The highest traffic peak on the Akamai platform during a single game of the tournament was during the semi-final between France and Belgium, during which bandwidth reached 22.52Tbps. The France-Croatia final drove the second-highest bandwidth peak of the tournament at 20.66Tbps.

The number of minutes of footage streamed also vastly increased from Brazil to Russia. From start to finish, 29.3 billion minutes of football action were streamed from Russia, a 63 per cent uplift on Brazil.

The final also drove 7.9 million concurrent streams. The peak in the tournament was during the group stage, where two games (Mexico-Sweden and South Korea-Germany) took place at the same time and achieved 9.7 million concurrent streams.

Peak bandwidth requirements for video streaming for the Russian tournament far exceeded that of the previous tournament in Brazil. 92 per cent of the games played in Russia topped out higher than the peak for the most-streamed match in Brazil. When the peak bandwidth numbers hit in every game of the tournaments are compared side by side, the average (median) peak in Russia was 10.54Tbps, more than tripling the median peak in Brazil of 3.29Tbps.