Archives for June 2010

Hello everyone,

This press release has just been sent out by BBC Sport.

It announces the TV viewing figures for yesterday's England game and also mentions that yesterday the BBC Sport website had the highest number of visitors of any day in our 10-year history. In fact the top three days for visitors to our website have been the last three days - Wednesday, Monday, Tuesday in that order.

I hope you are enjoying our coverage of the World Cup and Wimbledon on this website - I'd be delighted to get your feedback and will answer any questions about the website's coverage of these two major sporting events on the BBC.

BBC Sport's coverage of England's crucial decider against Slovenia drew a peak figure of 15.4m with an 81% audience share - the highest daytime audience of the tournament so far. The game averaged 12.9m viewers and a 78.2% audience share.

BBC Sport Online also saw record numbers to the site with 6m unique users, easily surpassing the previous record of 4.7m - set on Monday 21 June.

Another record was beaten with 1.5m users of AV on the site, beating the 1.2m achieved during last year's Wimbledon match between Andy Murray and Andy Roddick.

An additional 500,000 requests came from fans watching the match live in BBC iPlayer. The game will be available for the next seven days.

England's game against Germany will be shown live on BBC1 on Sunday 27 June from 1400 BST (kick-off at 1500 BST) and will also be available to UK users on the BBC Sport website and BBC iPlayer.

Lewis Wiltshire is the Editor of the BBC Sport website. He tweets about the BBC Sport site and answers questions about it on Twitter.

This blog entry was originally published on the BBC Internet Blog by James Offer and Matt Isherwood. Please visit the original entry to comment.

BBC World Service is already gripped by World Cup fever. We've been working on our own approach to broadcasting the matches, which launched with the opening match in South Africa. We're calling it the match stats module and you can see it in action on World Cup Team Talk.

Working for World Service Future Media involves a set of challenges with everything we develop and this one was no different. Everything we do must translate into a universal user experience in order to be relevant to the users of the 32 language services we support.

For the World Cup we do not have the rights (like BBC Sport) to broadcast live audio or video streams. What we have instead is the Press Association data feeds (more on these later). We are also aware that for many of our international audiences the BBC may not be their first port of call for World Cup action. We knew we'd need to offer something different.

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Like Fabio Capello, we at the BBC Sport website have known most of our plans for the World Cup for months, but also like the England boss, we are still making some last-minute alterations and tweaks on the eve of the tournament.

We publicly launched our World Cup site on 11 May - as we marked one month to go until the tournament - and my how that month has flown.

I will try to explain here, with two days to go until that first game between hosts South Africa and Mexico, what our offering on this website will be during the World Cup - what's already there and what you can still expect to see.

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