The 2014 World Cup made millions of soccer fans out of Americans who couldn't have told a winger from a false 9 five weeks ago. In similar numbers, it has also initiated them into the joys of TV Everywhere.
After the group stage ended, I reported that more than 2.6 million people downloaded the WatchESPN mobile app during those two weeks, almost twice as many downloads as
Now that the tournament has concluded,
Xfinity subscribers (and perhaps a few friends with access to their passwords) watched 13 million live streams of matches, working out to about 90,000 streams for every hour of match coverage. That's 55% more streams than Xfinity served during the Sochi Winter Olympics in February, the company's previous high-water mark for streaming. "Every time we think we’ve hit a certain benchmark, we find we’re exceeding it," says Matt Strauss, Comcast's senior vice president and general manager of video.
Not surprisingly, the two most streamed matches were Team USA's games against Belgium and Germany. Somewhat surprisingly, the final between Argentina and Germany wasn't among the top five. Rounding out the top five were three weekday matches: the two semi-finals and the Round of 16 match between Argentina and Switzerland. "It’s fair to assume that one use case was people accessing content at work," says Strauss.
Another use case was people catching up on matches already in progress using the Instant On Demand feature, which Comcast enabled for all matches. That accounted for about 1 million views.
"TV Everywhere is ready for its close-up," says Strauss. "It's taking a little bit longer than we would have liked, but we're only encouraged by what we've seen."
