February 5, 2006

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Super Bowl viewers ratings: 1 billion ? Urban myth?

February 5, 2006 in Industry, Services by Administrator | 1 comment

I’m just scratching the surface of this subject but 5 minutes ago I heard, on CBC news (canadian public broadcaster), that the Super Bowl attracted 1 billion viewers… I haven’t found the answer yet but as I said in my previous post, wikipedia (whoever that is!) suggests that this is probalby an urban myth:
 
There is a popular urban myth regarding the Super Bowl — that the game is watched in 234 countries by 1 billion people, a fact unlikely to be true considering the time of the event, and the lack of popularity American Football has outside of the United States. In actual fact, Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005 was watched by 93 million viewers in total, of which 98 percent were in North America. Approximately half of the remaining 2 million worldwide viewers watched from the United Kingdom.
 
Just to have a better idea, I found the ratings of other big broadcast events:

My guts feelings tell me that soccer is the real global sport. How could american football be so popular all around the globe?

Anyone has the answer?

Super Bowl and Broadcasting

February 5, 2006 in Applications, Services, public broadcasting by Administrator | 1 comment

The 40th Super Bowl is currently live on TV. Either through cable, satellite, IPTV or off air, it requires a capacity that we can’t have off the Net today. With its extremely high Nielsen ratings, it shows the best features of broadcasting: Live, high capacity bitstream, one-to-many-many-many. The broadcast infrastructure is at its best here. It’s currently the only channel that supports the dissimination of the head of the longtail live, in HD, to the largest audience of the year.
 
2006_02_05_SuperBowlXL.png
 
By the way, wikipedia provides a good description of the event. There could be as much as 100 millions viewers this year, mostly in the U.S. (1 billion is an urban legend) . As a comparison, there were 3.8 billion viewers of the 2000 olympic games in Sydney.
 
Well, now I have to leave you. Mick Jagger is singing his “I can’t get no satisfaction”. I’ll be one of 100 millions with you…

links for 2006-02-05

February 5, 2006 in Uncategorized by delus | No comments

Podcasting according to Rogers

February 5, 2006 in Uncategorized by Administrator | 7 comments

Last week, this press release anounced North America’s first wireless podcast service.  Rogers Wireless will offer more than 1500 podcasts to canadian consumers using melodeo’s mobilecast technology.
 
2006_02_05-mobilcast.gif
 
The service costs 5$ per month plus, of course, data traffic.
 
I have my doubts about this service model. I feel that there is no real benefit compared to downloading and synching to the PC. Podcasts are convenient because they are normally not time critical. They are time-shifting proof. I see other problems too:
  • Limited (filtered) offer: there are (will be) millions of podcasts out there
  • Pay for something that’s free.
  • Could be hard on the battery. Podcasts are large files

Mobile Broadcasting such as DMB and DVB-H will also be much more efficient for that kind of applications.