Big data and the Olympics

NBC has unleashed a huge amount of data about how Americans watched the London Olympics: we watched on TV, yes, but we also watched on NBC's web sites, on our computers, tablets, and phones. We tweeted and posted comments on Facebook. And, the New York Times reports, a bunch of us participated in studies about what we did. The data don't seem to be available publicly yet, but NBC Universal (the research lab) shared some of its conclusions with the Times. Here are some of the findings:

[E]ight million people downloaded NBC’s mobile apps for streaming video, and there were two billion page views across all of NBC’s Web sites and apps. Forty-six percent of 18- to 54-year-olds surveyed said they “followed the Olympics during my breaks at work,” and 73 percent said they “stayed up later than normal” to watch, according to a survey of about 800 viewers by the market research firm uSamp . . . .

The results signaled vast changes from just two years ago in Vancouver, when tablets and mobile video streaming were still in their infancy. The two most streamed events on any device during the London Olympics, the women’s soccer final and women’s gymnastics, surpassed all the videos streamed during the Vancouver Olympics combined. 

Fascinating. That's all I have time for today, but I will keep an eye on the story.

Olympics Roundup

The pending London Olympics bring to mind all sorts of numerical constructs, including this article by Nate Silver of the New York Times (taking a break from political commentary for the Olympics? Here's James Fallows' thought about the American practice of stopping our campaigns in the summer.) Silver is writing about which sports (weightlifting, but not badminton) smaller nations should pick in order to put their athletes in medal contention. There was also an interesting article in yesterday's NY Times about nations, or sporting federations, using various undercover tactics to understand competitors', well, tactics.* And here's an article from The Atlantic.com about why hosting the Olympics is usually a bad economic bet.

So it seems like a good time for an update on the 2012 Greatest Sporting Nation quest. As you may recall, I mentioned it in this post last year, comparing sports ranking methodology with the New York City Public Schools methods rating methodology for schools. (The school raters would learn something from the sports raters.) The screenshot above is Greatest Sports Nation's look at the "Global Cup Progress." GSN also predicts that the US will "win" the Olympics, with "win" defined as most placements in the top eight of every sport, weighted by popularity (number of countries that participate in each sport) and whether the sport is a team or an individual sport. Junkies can read the full methodology here.


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* Sorry if I'm putting you above your 10-article monthly limit if you're not a subscriber. The Atlantic Wire has a nice daily feature "Trimming the Times" that summarizes the 10 top stories every day.