The end to the 77-year wait for a British winner in the Gentlemen’s Singles at Wimbledon contributed to a successful fortnight for BBC Sport.
As Andy Murray gladdened hearts, the BBC had established its most comprehensive digital coverage from the All England Club with up to 10 live streams and on-demand content available across four screens – PCs, mobiles, tablets and connected TVs.
This effort was rewarded with 27.08m UK browsers pointing at the BBC Sport site – peaking at 6.47 million UK browsers on Friday July 5 when Murray beat Janowicz in Wimbledon semi-final live streams of the BBC’s Wimbledon coverage drove viewing across all online platforms – with 12.7 million video requests throughout the Championships – the highest audience for online viewing for the BBC since the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Use of mobile and tablet devices remained popular, with 64% of total requests to the BBC Sport site on Sunday 7 July from handheld devices (Wimbledon Men’s Final day) – with a record 1.03m browsers from tablets.
Chris Condron, Head of Sport Product, BBC Future Media, said: “The London 2012 Olympic Games set the new bar for digital coverage from the BBC. In the past two weeks, we have seen again the huge audience interest in and appetite for consuming live events digitally – not just for Wimbledon, but for Formula 1 and Glastonbury. Whether at the office, at home or on the go, we continue to take audiences closer to the major events that bring the nation together.”
With the BBC reducing the number of streams used by the ‘linear’ Red Button on an everyday basis, permission was required from Ofcom to open up Multiplex C capacity on DTT for both Wimbledon and the Glastonbury music festival.
