How much has live-streaming of video over the internet replaced broadcast and cable transmission on a global basis in just five years?
A lot.
According to Akamai, Italy’s penalty kick-fueled European Championship win over England Sunday generated peak internet traffic of 34.9 terabytes per second, almost five times as much data than the 7.26 Tbps that was streamed back in 2016, when Portugal defeated France for the Euro title.
Overall, the 51 “2020 Euro Championship” matches (the tourney was pushed to 2021 due to the pandemic) generated an average of 17.5 Tbps, vs. an average of 4.11 Tbps for the tournament five years earlier.
Other later round games, meanwhile, also generated huge data usage numbers--the round-of-16 game between England and Germany resulted in usage of 33.9 Tbps, for example.
Akamai said it helped customers live stream nearly 580 million hours of tournament coverage this time around vs. 164 million hours in 2016.
