Over-the-top (OTT) traffic levels more than doubled Sunday, Aug. 20, as peak concurrent plays hit traditional TV-scale numbers, according to Conviva.
Conviva is an analytics provider for more than 200 OTT brands that deliver both live and on-demand content.
In a blog post, Conviva CMO Ed Haslam says on average, the company sees about 2 million concurrent plays at a given time. However, last Sunday night that number more than doubled to 4.73 million across all customers.
Haslam says Conviva can’t disclose which services caused the spike due to customer confidentiality. However, he teased that the spikes were mostly driven because “two major publishers ‘aired’ both a popular sporting event on one ‘channel’ and a very popular episodic show on another ‘channel.’
Although it’s not confirmed, the spike does appear to coincide with the airing of Game of Thrones’ penultimate episode, which Deadline reported had 10.24 million viewers, making it the second most watched episode of the series run up until that point. Including plays on platforms like HBO Go and HBO Now, Deadline says the “Beyond The Wall” episode had a total of 14.2 million viewers.
Conviva’s concurrent viewer figures for this past Sunday, August 27, which hosted the Game of Thrones season finale, were not immediately available.
These spikes are happening more and more often, and reaching higher levels, according to Haslam. Concurrent play spikes a few years ago reportedly might have reached to the hundreds of thousands, and then settle into the tens of thousands. Now though, they reach into the millions.
And interestingly, Haslam says, these spikes are not only driven by live sporting events anymore.
“Today’s most popular episodic TV shows can drive massive concurrent viewing greater than many sports,” Haslam writes.
These surges in traffic also require a large amount of internet delivery capacity for the amount of viewing, which is four to five times above the norm, according to Haslam.
He says the high number of viewers in a single broadcast audience changes the game for OTT publishers “because these mass scale audiences can also drive mass scale disappointment if their service cannot scale to meet audience expectations of seamless, high quality viewing.”
