The research identified the Men’s 100m sprint final as the Olympic event most likely to be watched online with an average of 51% of all respondents. The next most popular event to be watched online was the Men’s 100m freestyle swimming event, with an average of 36%, followed by the Men’s Football final, which had an average of 30% of respondents claiming it as one of their most popular online events.

The study, carried out on behalf of Riverbed by several leading research firms across Europe, surveyed more than 3500 people across the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. The research uncovered that approximately one in five Europeans said that they were likely to watch more of this summer’s events over the internet as compared to previous Olympic Games. It also found that over half of all online Olympic viewers would be unwilling to tolerate delays of over two minutes when streaming services before moving to a different source.

Apurva Davé, vice president of products, Stingray^TM Business Unit, at Riverbed said: “Europeans are changing their viewing habits. And global sporting events like Olympic Games often create traffic spikes as people use their PCs, laptops or mobile devices to watch their favorite athletes, get real-time updates on events, and purchase event-related merchandise. Organisations must take extra measures to meet the demand spike created by the Olympics. If they do not, and their websites are not responsive at peak times, then they could see their viewers giving up and choosing to watch the Games through other means instead – that potentially means lost advertising revenue and forgone e-commerce opportunities.”

Riverbed works with organisations worldwide to address performance challenges encountered by enterprise users and consumers when accessing applications and data online. The Riverbed Stingray family provides application delivery controller (ADC) and web content optimisation (WCO) solutions that enable enterprises to create, manage and deliver key services quickly, more flexibly and at a lower cost. Stingray also allows organisations to control and optimise web services by inspecting, transforming, prioritising and routing application traffic, so that the online experience remains fast and reliable even during major events such as the Olympics.