CBC Olympics App Topped 636 Million Views, Most-Watched Winter Games Ever

The CBC has released updated stats on the state of its Sochi Olympics coverages and the numbers have deemed this year’s Winter Games the most-watched in history, thanks to the addition of its digital audience on mobile and desktop platforms.

“We at CBC/Radio-Canada are incredibly proud to have provided Canadian viewers and athletes with the coverage of Sochi 2014 that they clearly wanted and definitely deserved across all of our platforms,” said Heather Conway, executive vice president, English services, CBC. “There is a long tradition of world-class Olympic coverage from Canada’s public broadcaster and the overwhelming audiences our broadcasts garnered tell me we’ve lived up to – if not exceeded – the expectations we had when we secured the broadcast rights just 18 months ago.”

The consumption of the Olympics this year was nearly double that of the 2010 Vancouver Olympic games. It helps that in four years, millions of more smartphones and tablets have been adopted by Canadians to view content. The CBC Olympics app topped 2.5 million downloads on iOS and Android.

Here are the notable stats:

• February 6-23: more than 33.35 million Canadians viewed at least some Sochi 2014 content in English or French across all platforms.
• cbc.ca/olympics and olympiques.radio-canada.ca together received over 256 million website views
• CBC Olympics app garnered more than 380 million views for a combined total of more than 636 million views from February 6-23.
• 10.7 million Canadians watched Olympic content via online streams on the CBC and/or SRC sites throughout Sochi 2014; consumed about 14 million hours of online video content.
• As of February 23, there were more than 2.5 million downloads of the  CBC Olympic Games Mobile App on iOS and Android devices.
• Day 16 (Sunday, February 23) was the most-watched day of Sochi 2014 with a daily reach of 26.5 million viewers.

As for the Men’s Ice Hockey gold medal match? It was viewed by roughly 15 million Canadians, which the CBC describes as “generating an average 2+ audience of more than 8.5 million over the five networks that broadcast the game live from 7:10 – 9:19 a.m. ET. The audience peaked at 9:19 a.m. ET with 12 million viewers across all networks as the final seconds ticked off the clock.”

The Men’s Hockey Semifinal set a record 625,000 mobile and desktop viewers back on February 21.

After it was all said and done, coverage of the Sochi Olympics by CBC’s mobile app and online platforms was quite impressive and deserves a fist bump or two. Did you watch the Sochi Olympics on TV, mobile or desktop?