Although it may have felt like your Facebook news feed, Twitter streams, and other social media networks were flooded with updates about Beyonce, the big blackout, ads, and Joe Flacco – Super Bowl XLVII didn’t drive people online. In fact, it pulled them offline in a big way.
Broadband traffic analysts Sandvine is reporting that this year saw a return of the Super Dip, a phrase they coined last year to describe the plunge in internet traffic during the Super Bowl.
Sandvine looked at a sample of internet traffic across the eastern U.S. and saw that overall network usage was down roughly 15% during the Super Bowl. The biggest dip in Internet use occurred right at the game was getting underway.
But that doesn’t mean that web traffic was dead. Cordcutters made a significant impact on total traffic as CBS internet stream of the big game accounted for over 3% of total network traffic on Sunday evening.
Still,
“At Sandvine’s we’ve long maintained that the biggest screen is always the best screen to consume content, and for the Super Bowl it makes sense that most people would prefer to watch the game on their large HDTV. Since the only option to stream the game was via a web browser, getting the game streaming to their TV would have been a challenge for most people, so unsurprisingly viewers opted to tune in via their cable or satellite provider (in record numbers).”
Are you a fan of the “second screen,” in that you follow big television events like The Super Bowl or The Oscars on social media? Or do you find yourself forgetting about the internet when you have something big to hold your attention on the big screen?