NBC’s live streaming a hit for hockey fans

With each succeeding U.S. Olympic hockey game this week from Sochi, Russia, NBC Sports watched as the number of people streaming the game live grew.

On Wednesday, when the U.S. men’s team beat the Czech Republic, 798,337 people, or unique users, streamed the game on computers, tablets and smartphones.

On Thursday, when the Canadian women’s team defeated the United States in overtime in the gold-medal game, the number swelled to 1.16 million.

Then in the men’s semifinal Friday, which started at noon, 2.1 million people streamed Canada’s 1-0 shutout of the United States, watching a total of 65 million minutes.

“It’s the biggest stream ever for NBC Sports and beats the Super Bowl two years ago, just barely,” said Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager for digital media at NBC Sports Group.

NBC had been concerned that office computer networks could be overloaded with people trying to stream the game from their desks at work. Too many people watching in the same office could cause the stream to slow and buffer, or even shut down.

Some used Twitter to complain.

“Currently watching USA/Canada vs. buffering,” SeanOB19 wrote. “Either that or there is a lot more pausing in hockey than I remember.”

Some seemed to revel in it.

“Being a true America and watching live stream of the USA vs. Canada hockey on my iPad in class,” anna2056 wrote.

Said Cordella: “I looked at the Internet and only saw a few complaints.”

In digital parlance, the term unique users refers to the people who come and go throughout an event that is streamed. They might start it, leave at the intermissions and return.

Cordella estimated that if the U.S. team had scored and sent the game into overtime, the number of unique users could have risen by as much as 40 percent.

Another measure, that of people watching the stream at any particular moment, indicated it rising throughout the game and peaking at 850,000 at 2:09 p.m., just before the end.

Streaming is a significant part of NBC’s Olympic strategy. For the second Olympics in a row from Europe, it is streaming all the events live, believing, as other media companies do, that it is critical to reach a population increasingly comfortable with watching programming apart from television.

“This bodes well for the NHL playoffs,” Cordella said. “Hopefully we’re breaking people into the new form of consumption and will stick around for more of our sports events.”

Overall, 9.1 million livevideo users have streams from Sochi, up 24 percent from the 2012 London Games.

Live streaming is also viewed, more than ever, as a way to lift viewership in prime time, where most of the broadcast advertising is for the Olympics, even if it means the results are known in advance.

Through Thursday, the 14th day of coverage in Sochi, NBC averaged 22.5 million viewers, down 9 percent from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games, which were carried mostly live in the evening.

But NBC prefers to point out that the Sochi figures are up 7 percent from the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, which were carried on a lengthy delay, as is Sochi.