MUMBAI: The streamers are on the rise and what better way to get everyone online at the same time than sports. The FIFA world cup 2018 in Russia saw more online viewers glued in the group stage itself than the entire 2014 world cup.

The rise in mobile data consumption and emergence of OTT platforms can be regarded as major reasons behind the enormous increase of online viewers.

According to a study released by cloud delivery platform Akamai, viewers of the first round of Russia 2018 streamed 65 per cent more data compared to the whole season of Rio World Cup.

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The study revealed that the highest number of concurrent streams peaked at 9.7 million on 27 June during Mexico-Sweden and South Korea-Germany matches. In the entire Rio tournament, the record viewing peak hit five million during concurrent streams only.

According to another report quoted by Forbes during the first week of the World Cup, 393 million plays of matches were successfully streamed via 59 million unique video streaming apps.  On the other hand, Akamai reports that while the peak bandwidth in Brazil was 6.99 Tbps, it was 23.8 Tbps in the first round in Russia.