YouTube video delivery worthy of Olympic gold: Over 500K concurrent livestreams at peak

While the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony concluded last week, YouTube is just now revealing the event’s impressive viewership and streaming data.

YouTube delivered a total of 231 million video streams during the two-week global sporting event to more than 64 countries across the world. The site also managed to deliver more than half a million livestreams at the same time during the peak of all Olympic event viewing. (To put that into perspective, YouTube pointed out that the peak livestream audience could fill a venue five times the size of London’s huge Wembley Stadium, which has a capacity of 105,000 people sitting and standing.)

Viewing data for the Olympics in the U.S. was also impressive, but nowhere near what it could have been if NBC hadn’t put up a paywall, as VentureBeat Executive Editor Dylan Tweney points out in his latest column.

Check out the full stats below.

Roundup of YouTube’s Olympic viewing data:

• 231 million total streams watched across the U.S. and 64 countries in Africa and Asia.
• Of that worldwide total, 72 million total streams came from the  International Olympics Committee’s (IOC) official YouTube Channel.
• At peak viewership, YouTube delivered video for over 500,000 livestreams at the same time.
• YouTube delivered over 159 million total streams in the U.S. via NBC’s official Olympics website.
• 37 percent of views from NBC came from people using mobile devices, and over half streamed the videos in HD quality.
• YouTube’s official IOC channel for U.S. users brought in more than 6.75 million views — which is understandably lower due to NBC holding the licensing to stream the actual events through its own branded apps/web channels.

Top image via IOC