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World Cup Drove New Media Tools
By Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
July 19, 2006 -- (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) -- This summer's World Cup soccer tournament drew in an audience of millions of enthusiastic fans around the world.
While some fans managed to attend the games in person, the rest of the world watched at home, in a pub, or just about anywhere they could find a television set.
And for the first time in World Cup history, fans were given the opportunity to take advantage of BBC's live Internet video streaming of all the games.
Multimedia hosting and data center services provider TelecityRedbus (telecityredbus.com), which houses the BBC Web site, conducted a survey of the game-viewing habits of UK soccer fans, revealing some encouraging details about the ways they accessed the tournament.
"This is the first time that a major tournament has had the opportunity to have live streaming media at all," says Mike Tobin, CEO of TelecityRedbus. "It's the sort of groundbreaking position that the World Cup in 1966 had when it was the transition from black and white to color television. We wanted to capture how many people were viewing, what their experiences were and whether [streaming video] was a success or not."
The results showed that consumers are, beginning to embrace new multimedia services and applications.
An estimated 10 percent of respondents took advantage of the BBC's live video streaming, watching the games on a four- by six-inch viewing screen at the office. An additional 51.5 percent said they checked the Web or on their cell phones for text updates.
The live video streaming was only offered to UK visitors to the site, which the BBC regulated by tracking their IP addresses. Tobin says that the BBC could not stream World Cup action outside of the UK because it would be infringing on the exclusive cable and satellite FIFA broadcasting rights set in other countries.
With 92 percent of Britain's Internet traffic running through TelecityRedbus' building in London, Tobin says it is extremely important for TelecityRedbus to know the on goings of its customers' online activity.
"Our existing customer base is growing by 40 percent a year," says Tobin. "It's burgeoning on the back of more and more content being applied to the network, as well as people's sophistication and their ability to receive it in multiple devices."
TelecityRedbus has 17 carrier-diverse data center facilities and provides round-the-clock engineering support to over 1,500 organizations, including content-rich digital businesses, corporate enterprises, communications service providers and the public sector, across seven countries in Europe.
It is this increase in the quantities of incoming content and storage to the TelecityRedbus buildings that require the data center service provider to offer more capacity for both its existing and new customers.
And as technology like live video streaming of major events like the World Cup and last summer's Live 8 become more prevalent, Tobin says it is just a matter of time until all events will be streamed live.
"I'm pretty sure that everything will be streamed within the next few years," says Tobin. "Everything is going to be access on demand."
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