Olympics Opening Ceremony breaks iPlayer record

Olympics Opening Ceremony breaks iPlayer record
Opening Ceremony - taking gold in iPlayer requests

Danny Boyle's Opening Ceremony Extravaganza has broken the record for number of requests in a single day on iPlayer.

On Saturday, the day after it aired live on the BBC, the Opening Ceremony racked up 925,000 requests, while James Bond sky-diving with the Queen notched up 640,000 views on YouTube.

The splendour of the unexpectedly brilliant ceremony out of the way, the nation's attention turned to the actual sports: Saturday saw the BBC Sport site set a new record of 7.8 million global browsers, only for it to be smashed the next day.

Sunday was the busiest day ever on the BBC Sport site (to date) as 6.1 million unique browsers logged on in the UK, and 8.3 million worldwide.

App-tacular

It's not all about the website though as the BBC Sport Olympics app has hit 1.15 million downloads as well.

There's a bit of a sigh of relief emanating from the BBC camp, as its ambitious digital Olympics plans seem to be paying off.

Cait O'Riordan, head of product for sport and 2012 at the BBC, blogged, "We have been testing the infrastructure and the sites we have built for the games for months using test data and streams and artificial traffic and we were really confident it would work.

"But even so it's nerve wracking turning it all on and showing it to vast numbers of real users – so we are thrilled that it's all working so well."

News Editor (UK)

Former UK News Editor for TechRadar, it was a perpetual challenge among the TechRadar staff to send Kate (Twitter, Google+) a link to something interesting on the internet that she hasn't already seen. As TechRadar's News Editor (UK), she was constantly on the hunt for top news and intriguing stories to feed your gadget lust. Kate now enjoys life as a renowned music critic – her words can be found in the i Paper, Guardian, GQ, Metro, Evening Standard and Time Out, and she's also the author of 'Amy Winehouse', a biography of the soul star.

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