Olympics boost BBC website

Despite Team GB's massive medal haul, it is the BBC's website that is the star of the Beijing Olympics.

The BBC's online coverage, which gives surfers the choice of watching several different events and a live text commentary that doesn't need to be manually refreshed, has proved popular over the last two weeks.

According to web monitoring firm Hitwise, 'bbc olympics' was second in its list of fast-moving search terms last week.

"As the official UK broadcaster of the games, the BBC has benefitted significantly from the weekend's success," said Robin Goad of Hitwise.

The innovations introduced to the BBC Sport website have proved very popular, according to Hitwise.

"The 'Live Action' Olympics feed, which includes both text updates and video streaming via iPlayer, has evidently helped keep people on the BBC Sport site, with the average session time increasing to an all time high of 8 minutes 46 seconds," Goad said.

ISP PlusNet said it had seen massive surges of traffic related to the BBC's Olympic coverage.

Traffic levels were twice as high as normal during the opening ceremony, PlusNet said, and the company has reported a 140 per cent increase in usage throughout the games.

James Price of the BBC confirmed that some 400,000 people had logged on to online coverage of the opening ceremony via the website.

Neil Armstrong, product director at PlusNet said: "Britain's Olympic success has led to more and more people logging on at work to watch the medals roll in.

"We expect new viewing figure records to be broken as the Games reach their climax and Great Britain rounds off one of its most successful Olympics ever."

www.bbc.co.uk/sport
www.hitwise.com
www.plus.net