RTÉ achieves online record for Olympics despite restrictions

DESPITE BEING prevented from broadcasting outside Ireland, RTÉ has achieved a record audience for its online coverage of the …

DESPITE BEING prevented from broadcasting outside Ireland, RTÉ has achieved a record audience for its online coverage of the Beijing Olympics.

Last Tuesday, August 19th, 148,974 live streams of Olympics-related programmes were served up from the RTÉ website. This does not suggest 148,000 unique viewers, as each time a user clicks into live coverage it is counted as a new stream. Irish interest in the Olympics peaked on Tuesday when boxers Kenny Egan and Paddy Barnes won fights which guaranteed them at least bronze medals, while Paul Hession ran in the 200m semifinal. At lunchtime on that day a total of 12,736 concurrent live video streams were served from the RTÉ website.

On Wednesday, Darren Sutherland's fight against Alfonso Blanco was watched by more than 20,000 people online.

The numbers exceed the national broadcaster's previous record for online viewers, achieved during the Munster Football Final replay in July 2006. Dublin-based Complete Telecom provided RTÉ with extra bandwidth from its metro fibre network to support the high level of interest.

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However, GAA fans outside Ireland have been prevented from viewing live championship games for the duration of the Beijing Olympics due to the restrictive nature of the contract RTÉ signed with the International Olympic Committee. This stipulates that broadcasts containing any Olympic content should only be made available to viewers in the Republic of Ireland.

As a result RTÉ has stopped all live audio and video broadcasting on the internet for the duration of the Olympics.

"For instance, if Pat Kenny was to interview an Irish person via a mobile phone and they happened to be in an official Olympic car, we cannot play that interview outside Ireland," RTÉ says on its website.

"Realistically, this means we need to block all live streams, radio and television, because we cannot monitor all of the streams 24 hours."

An explanatory note briefly published on the RTÉ website has laid the blame at the door of US broadcaster NBC, which paid $894 million for the exclusive rights to the Beijing Games.