Streaming over 6.4 million videos

Sep 9, 2009 08:16 GMT  ·  By

The US Open has entered its second week with the matches getting hotter as the final rounds draw closer. And, this year, the tournament is already enjoying a record audience, based on the first-week numbers, but not on TV or cable, but online, at the very well designed USOpen.org. In fact, the site saw a 60-percent increase in unique visitors from last year, thanks to the introduction of live video, as paidContent has found.

In the first week, the site got over 5.3 million unique visitors, more than double than in 2008, according to numbers from the US Tennis Association (USTA), and those five million users visited the site a total of 23 million times. Tennis fans watched over 6.4 million streams during the week, having opened 1.4 million media console sessions. The time they spent watching also shows that, while online streaming isn't a direct replacement for a TV broadcast and the viewing habits are different online, most users can and do watch online videos for longer periods of time, as the average streaming duration was of three hours and ten minutes.

The tournament's mobile offerings proved to be quite popular and the iPhone app, which offered radio coverage of the matches and allowed users to view the featured videos on the site (but not the live streams), was downloaded more than 175,000 times. The viewing patterns were also to be expected for the online offering, with most people watching the matches during work hours, and the largest audience watching on Friday during the day.

The biggest addition to the site this year, which proved to be a success so far, was the introduction of the live streaming. Fans were treated to an offering that couldn't be matched on TV, with the site streaming up to five concurrent matches, which users could switch to by using a small thumbnail view. The stream also allowed them to keep up with the scores for all the matches and they all included professional commentary and, as an added bonus, little to no ads.