One success story has already emerged from a memorable UEFA EURO 2008™ – the tournament's official website, euro2008.com, has registered record traffic of more than one billion page views since its launch in February 2008.
Participation
So far in June, more than 42 million visitors from over 200 countries have logged on to text, multimedia and video coverage of the action. Up to 4.3 million visitors logged on during a single day of the finals, and up to half a million visitors per hour follow live coverage on the web. Traffic numbers are already up by more than 250 per cent compared to euro2004.com. "We have had an extremely good response about everything from those surfing the internet," said Alexandre Fourtoy, CEO of UEFA Media Technologies SA which is UEFA's subsidiary in charge of site production. "We also see a lot of interaction between the fans and ourselves. As our website was made for the fans by the fans, it is really a pleasure to see everyone participating all day long."
Content variety
On euro2008.com football content is available whenever and however fans want it. For the first time, all content is being distributed from one centralised source, feeding into the overall euro2008.com offering and fulfilling the video, audio, text and photo content needs of the converging world. Around 800,000 visitors have already logged on to the free video magazine section, while over 1.2 million have been into the replay video section. In addition, more than 800,000 visitors have accessed the website through a wireless or mobile device. This is the first time the official EURO website has offered video coverage in three different ways: live match simulcast in collaboration with UEFA broadcasting partners, video on demand supplying individual matches, and highlights and free videos produced as vodcasts shown twice a day with news interviews and reports from around the event.
'Exceptional'
"This website is about football so [there is] all the information you want to find about the teams and the players," Alexandre Fourtoy added. "We have an exceptional set of statistics, and we have a great matchcentre which offers heat maps live for all the players during the game." If you are on your PC at work, or if you want to see a game you missed, the website has all bases covered. "If you want a little bit of fun, thanks to all UEFA's sponsor partners, we have a great set of sole and exclusives to play, to interact, to exchange, to publish photos."
Host broadcasting
How are the figures measured? "Page views are an old way of measuring the internet," Fourtoy explained. "Today it is the number of visits and visitors that counts. Depending on the sections, traffic is between 2.5 times and three times that of 2004, which is really much more than the average growth of the internet during this period." Livex is the key element of the converge approach adopted for this tournament. "We are in charge of the host broadcast operations. We have a lot of television stations [involved], 34 here in the IBC and another 100 throughout the world, and we wanted also to feed them with the additional features we're producing all around the tournament.
'Internet platform'
"Livex is a kind of internet platform where you can browse and download additional programming thanks to the internet. It will be broadcast quality but it is using a dedicated internet network. It allows televisions very far away to have access to what we have been producing as if they were here. It is a mixture between television technology, IT technology, web technology so it's what we're all about." Amid this success, Fourtoy and his team refuse to rest on their laurels as there are other targets to chase. "EURO has always been a showcase where we test, use and develop for [the UEFA website] uefa.com," he said. "EURO will be over in a few days, we still have great games to wait for, but just afterwards our season starts again. On uefa.com, you will soon see everything we have been inventing."
Click here for the press release on the UEFA EURO 2008™ website's success.
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