A Quick Look at UK Video Streaming Traffic for England’s WorldCup Games

Broadband ISP PlusNet has posted a couple of interesting snapshots of Internet video streaming traffic during England’s dismal opening matches of the 2014 Football WorldCup in Brazil. Suffice to say, ITV Player traffic is hardly a blip next to the huge popularity of BBC’s iPlayer service.

It’s important to note that both of England’s matches (England v Italy and England v Uruguay) have occurred outside of traditional working hours in the United Kingdom and as a result, much as our previous report revealed (here), neither of our failed attempts at WorldCup glory have had much of an impact on overall Internet traffic volumes (i.e. the majority of people simply went to the pub or watched on their TV sets).

Never the less some people did still choose to watch the games online and PlusNet has charted the impact this had on traffic for the BBC’s iPlayer, ITV Player, YouTube, Netflix and RTMPE (Real Time Messaging Protocol – this covers a bunch of private streams and other flash-based video services) service.

Dave Tomlinson of PlusNet said:

“The traffic patterns are interesting, the games on the BBC see relatively big increases in iPlayer traffic, people watching online perhaps because they don’t have a TV, or someone else is watching the TV or they don’t have access to a TV as they’re at work. There’s a small amount of traffic for ITV Player but there’s more traffic from people watching the ITV games from an alternate source. Could it possibly be because viewers lost faith in ITV Player after it failed during the opening game or perhaps the adverts?

Other interesting patterns stand out, at half time people put a bit of YouTube on. It’s a particularly high peak during the ITV game, maybe because the kids are allowed to stay up and watch.”

Unfortunately PlusNet hasn’t included a baseline curve for the related services, so it’s difficult to see how these would compare with normal usage, although the clear peaks do appear to support some of the ISPs assumptions (note: ITV Player often streams at a lower and less demanding quality than iPlayer). But of course today marks the final game of England’s WorldCup campaign, against Costa Rica, and PlusNet was initially expecting to see a big surge in traffic due to the 5pm kick-off (i.e. many people finish work after 5pm).

However the ISP now predicts “traffic to be the lowest of the three England games by about a third” because people have lost interest (we’re already out of the tournament). On the other hand we’re curious to see how Hodgson’s alternative player line-up performs and will be watching, albeit with a perpetual sigh etched onto our faces.