The ugliest moment of this years Olympics became one of the most viewed video for the Beijing Olympics. Janos Baranyai, the hungarian weightlifter ended his run for the medal when he dislocated his right elbow. This video alone has got over 5 million views and is still getting about 50k views a day today, down from about 100k views it was getting a week earlier. A picture is worth a thousand words, see for yourself.

First, both the ceremonies were just amazing and was a feast for the eyes. Its hard to compares such events but we have some data from our Scope Video platform to put them against each other. We decided to compare the online video viewership of both the events. Almost a week after the games are over, the aggregate videos are still getting about 130k views per day across close to 70 video sites. Below is the breakdown of the total videos uploaded for these events in the Olympics.

The traffic stats for both these ceremonies are very similar as of today. On the 25th, after the Olympics concluded, the closing ceremony edged out the opening ceremony by 200k views but soon the viewership leveled off and are receiving approximately 130k views per day.

The top 5 countries consuming these videos were located in United States, Great Britain, China, Australia & Canada. Though the closing ceremony was more popular in Australia than Canada. Below is the country breakdown of both the events as observed in the Scope video platform.

Opening Ceremony

Closing Ceremony

After rousing speeches by Hillary yesterday and Bill Clinton today at the Democratic National Convention in Denver, Colorado; Democrats across the United States are waiting for their champion, Barack Obama, to take center stage tomorrow night.

Online video has played a pivotal role in this election’s party conventions and a flood of videos have already come in for the event. While McCain acknoledges he is no net guru, Barack’s team has done a good job f creating an online presence and has really engaged the net community remenicient of a brand like Nike or Coca-Cola.

There are 18 million democrats across the United States, but if you look at the online audience the numbers are mind boggling. Both candidates have channels on YouTube and below is quick overview of the total views. In terms of engagement, John McCains videos have managed to get equal number of comments and community reaction with far lesser videos compared to Barack’s channel.

If we look at the bigger picture here and include all he videos uploaded by any publisher across over 150 video sharing sites across the world, so far Barack has completely outdone the McCain campaign, let’s see if all these views and videos will convert into votes. For now both the campaigns have given enough video fodder for their followers to make this election a truly memorable one.

We are also comparing the conventions when it come to online video, so far there are over 1000 videos already out there for the DNC, mostly people posting their responses to the speeches and trying to do their bit to support the candidate. The videos uploaded for the convention have got close to 5 million views so far across 27 video sites and this is before the big speech by Barack himself tomorrow.

Watch this space to see how the biggest events for both parties fare online. We will prep up some interesting stats using our new Scope video metrics platform. Stay tuned.

Beijing Olympics came to an spectacular end in China today. China did not disappoint and the closing ceremony was as lavish and impressive as the opening ceremony and it gave the world an extravaganza to remember. People will be talking for a while about these events and will continue to look for any content possible for the Olympics online.

We were tracking every video and every user interaction from even before the games begun in Scope. The video uploads peaked right on the day one of the events with a significant number of videos coming in for the opening ceremony itself. The ceremonies remain the most watched “event” of the games and the most searched and watched videos online. YouTube received the gold medal as the lion share of those videos were being uploaded to the worlds most popular video sharing destination. YouTube alone has driven over 100m views so far with both live and deleted videos combined and no other site even comes close. The videos spread to over 70 video sharing sites from around the world with most views for those videos coming from United States, Canada, Great Britain and China. Thanks to the timings of the games in China, NBC could not show most of the events live leading to several people uploading full length HDTV quality games on peer-to-peer sites. Over 500 individual torrents were uploaded for the opening ceremony itself getting over 1m downloads so far.

Stay tuned for more interesting facts about the Olympics in the world of online video.