YouTube sees over 7.1m viewers on live streaming of IPL
Published on Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 21:57 | Source : CNBC-TV18
Updated at Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:55
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YouTube sees over 7.1m viewers on live streaming of IPL
YouTube has hit a record viewership with the live streaming of the Indian Premier League. The number touched 7.1 million as of today and is still counting.
Here is a verbatim transcript of the exclusive interview with Shailesh Rao on CNBC-TV18. Also watch the accompanying video.
Shailesh Rao: Because this is the first time anyone has broadcasted live sports on the internet anywhere in the world, we didn't really know what to expect. Ofcourse we believed that we could offer the cricket fans around the world and in India something unique. We are pleased to say that the numbers we are seeing exceed expectations and the viewership has been strong.
At the same time we are learning a lot because this is the first time we have done it, so we are constantly improving the user interface. We also recognise because of the unexpected volumes of users, we need to have more capacity to support more people around the world who are watching IPL on Youtube. So we are constantly improving the experience, it's a long season, but we are very pleased with what is happening today.
Q: There was some criticism in the first 2-3 days where viewers couldn't access the Youtube stream, some people said there was a deferment of about five minutes, so was that a concern, how did the sponsors react to that?
A: The experience is always delayed by 5 minutes, that's not a function of technical difficulties. We did have some early issues that we were sorting out around the video quality, but that again was because the viewership was larger than expected, so we had to quickly add some more capacity and prepare for the viewership we were seeing.
