Nico Gonzalez of Argentina competes for the ball against Spain's Rodri and Pedro Porro during the Fifa Men's World Cup final. Photo / Getty Images
It looks like New Zealand’s internet use hit an all-time high last month and Chorus, which operates the lion’s share of fibre connections, says it was thanks to the Fifa Men’s World Cup.
The football tournament helped average customer consumption for the month jump 13% year-on-year to 771GB.
Many watch it in the office
Many games for the Mexico-US-Canada-hosted tournament were during office hours for Kiws.
During the weekdays, business streaming activity increased by up to 35%, Chorus says.
The final between Spain and Argentina was the most-streamed game, with the estimated 180,000 concurrent streams during the extra time period, creating a 30% increase in the network traffic during the game and adding 1.2 petabytes (one million gigabytes) to the total daily data usage, Chorus said.
A further 760,000 watched the Monday morning (NZT) game on broadcast TV via TVNZ 1, according to Nielsen’s cumulative audience estimate.
The bandwidth consumption could have been higher.
Rights holder TVNZ erred on the side of caution, in budget and delivery risk, by passing on the option to stream the event in 4K HDR. Fifa also had options like 3D avatars for a first-person view from any player.
While sticking to lower resolution 1080p meant games sometimes looked better on an iPad than a big-screen TV, it did help the state-owned broadcaster get through the tournament without its service ever wobbling.
The stream ran about 30 seconds behind the broadcast, which could be annoying if you were monitoring social media about a match on your small screen. But it was a standard delay.
TVNZ said the tournament generated 20 million streams on its TVNZ+ platform, which offered a mix of free and paid content (the free matches included the All Whites’ games, the England-Argentina semi-final and the final).
But it has not revealed how many people paid $44.95 for its Event Pass, which offered access to every game. Head of sport Melodie Robinson told The Fold podcast that doing so would reveal what TVNZ had been willing to pay to secure the event, which would jeopardise future rights negotiations.
As the tournament wrapped up, the Herald revealed Robinson was off to a role with Amazon in New York. TVNZ used various Amazon Web Services products for its streaming service upgrade, including Clean Rooms for collecting (anonymised) data about viewers and their behaviour.
Chris Keall is an Auckland-based member of the Herald’s business team. He joined the Herald in 2018 and is the technology editor and a senior business writer.
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Source: New Zealand Herald
