This years soccer Word Cup seems to be the first one for which streaming video is widely available on the Internet. The Austrian public TV (ORF) is offering a decent livestream (or in the case of parallel games, two streams). So what do the public traffic statistics of the Internet Exchange Points show?
This graph is from the Vienna Internet Exchange. Some notable points:
- Gametime means traffic-peaks. The World Cup schedule is clearly visible in the graphs. Up to the 21th, there were three games per day, two close after each other, then a two hour break and then another game. Starting with the 22nd, there were four games a day, with two running in parallel. (the times in the graph are UTC!)
- Weekend have smaller spikes than workdays: On the 19th and 20th, the games are less visible than on the other days. It looks like watching the stream over the Internet is more popular in offices than at home. This makes sense as at home the TV screen is most likely the better place to watch soccer.
- Regarding traffic levels: from looking at the graphs, the biggest spikes seem to be around 8 Gbit/s. Assuming that this is mostly ORF streams for the Austrian public, one can assume that ORF/APA is pushing more than 10 Gbit/s during Word Cup games.