The Olympics have come and gone, but not without showcasing Kim Yu-Na’s grace on the ice, Apolo Ohno’s fast-growing medal collection, or mobile’s equally speedy growth, worthy of its own gold medal. In the past month, the games saw 87 million total mobile page views versus 52 million for the 2008 Beijing games. It’s a big sign that mobile tech is being adopted by the mainstream in America.
Stats released by NBC today show even more significant growth in mobile engagement with the games. NBC said its users initiated 2 million mobile video streams in Vancouver’s 17 days of competition. The number of mobile video streams during the Beijing Games was 301,000, six times less than 2010 games figures. Also, the NBC Olympics Mobile App was the top sports app at the iTunes store throughout the first weekend of the games and the final day of the Olympics.
“We’ve had a continuing digital explosion,” Timo Lumme, head of TV and marketing for the International Olympic Committee told a news conference earlier during the games. “We now have the same amount of hours covered globally on digital media — internet, mobile — as we have on the old media broadcasting, and a quarter of that is mobile.”
Through the first 11 days, NBC’s mobile platforms (consisting of its Web site and iTunes App) had generated 58.2 million page views, a 68 percent increase over the entire 17-day page-view total for the Beijing Games (34.7 million). At that point in the games, users had streamed over 1.4 million videos on their mobile devices, more than four times the 17-day total for Beijing. Alan Wurtzel, president of research at NBC, noted to Adweek that there was a rise in “simultaneous, synchronous” cross-platform viewing. Of mobile phone Olympics followers, about 50 percent also turned into NBC.com and watched a portion of the games on TV.