March Madness by the numbers

Looks like this past weekend’s NCAA men’s basketball tournament helped break a number of unoffical ‘Net records:

• The Akamai Net Usage Index – an aggrate of total visits to the top 100 or so news sites – hit a record 5,489,918 visits per minute on Thursday afternoon, the first day of the tournament.
• Akamai itself, which is helping to serve some of the live video of the tournement along with Limelight Networks, surpassed 200 gigabits per second of bandwidth usage last week. That’s just an insane amount of data.
• CBS announced that it served over 268,000 simultaneous streams of the tournament to online viewers and over 1.2 million total on Thursday alone. I am sure those people were all at home and not watching at work. It’s important to note that this is the first year that CBS has offered the online streams for free.

One other note: College basketball was not the only sport available free online this month. The Paralympic Winter Games in Torino, Italy, were also streamed live for anyone that wanted to see the action.