The Real Deal: Media Internet Convergence - World Cup Case Study
I think that the World Cup is a case study and proof point that the world is fully converging in media. Just look at the stats - millions of fans on-line consuming the World Cup in many different bite sized flavors. No longer are we locked into one video stream and then new analysis. We now can get the World Cup event in many flavors and many new angles on the overall global event - not just the game.
Akamai, the world's largest operator of a network of computers which carry video content, reports that today, opening day of the World Cup, is the busiest day for news sites. With some 11 million visitor requests per minute to its network, up 233 percent from the normal demand at this time.
Amazing Stats:
The Akamai News Index is tracking over 100 news video sites
http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/nui/news/index.html
The Net Usage Index for News enables users to monitor global news consumption 24 x 7, seeing in real-time the impact of current events on online media consumption. The Index features:
* Sociological and geographic trends—who's consuming news when and where
* Traffic by number of visitors per minute-viewed by geographic region or global composite
* Traffic by percentage above or below average-viewed by geographic region or global composite
Previous Records
Highest Peaks based on total visitors per minute
The highest peaks since inception of the Net Usage Index for News (August 18, 2005), based on total visitors per minutes. The following data ranks the top peaks, and the corresponding events that were taking place in the world at the time.
Nov. 4, 2008 11:00 PM 8,572,042
Barack Obama is victorious in historic presidential election
June 22, 2006 12:00 PM 7,283,584
U.S. eliminated by Ghana in World Cup
Mar. 20, 2008 2:30 PM 7,008,325
Day One of U.S. College Basketball 2008 Playoffs Coverage
Google is in the fray
To mark the event, FIFA.com, the world’s official football website, and Google have collaborated on a range of online features to help supporters keep track of how each team is doing throughout the tournament. Google is offering a Chrome extention for Fifa.com, embedding trending scored directly into search, among other custom features which the main one is a dedicated page google.com/worldcup
What we are seeing here is the biggest global media event in this new world of social media and new converged internet
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/06/fifacom-and-google-team-up-to-help-fans.html