England’s best performance in the World Cup for 28 years contributed to a record-breaking tournament for the BBC’s online services.
The Three Lions’ quarter-final against Sweden became the BBC’s highest online-viewed live programme ever with 3.8 million (3.9 million including on-demand) live requests on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport.
Neil Hall, Head of Sport Product, BBC Design & Engineering, says: “This World Cup has seen a huge increase in people following the action over the internet, through BBC Sport and BBC iPlayer. Live match requests rocketed from a total of 15.9m at Brazil 2014 to 56.3m this year, and World Cup content on the BBC Sport website went up from 32.3m UK unique browsers to 49.2m in the same period. We continue to improve things behind-the-scenes and create new experiences that make these major events even more engaging for our audiences.”
The VR app was downloaded over 400k times, and over 2.5m people registered for a BBC account
In all the tournament saw a record-breaking 66.8 million match requests (live and on-demand) with 56.3m of these being live requests.
The World Cup final between France and Croatia on Sunday delivered 2 million live requests (with 36,000 on-demand) to stream the match online on BBC iPlayer and BBC Sport.
