Tag Archive for: Olympics

Olympics Social Video Views, Cuban Commercial Flights

Olympics Draw Massive Views

Rio OlympicsThe 2016 Rio Olympics games drew serious video views but, unfortunately for NBC, those views were on Facebook. While NBC cited millennials as a reason for the 15% dip in ratings from the London 2012 games, 59% of the 285 million unique video viewers on Facebook came from people under the age of 35.

Social Times reports 139 million views also came from Facebook Live – giving credence to the accusation that NBC – and not millennials was to blame for a dip in network ratings. Many have noted that NBC made it exceptionally difficult to watch the games due to a poor streaming experience.

Indeed, more than 277 million people had more than 1.5 billion interactions with Olympic content on Facebook during the games. Snapchat also reported 50 million Olympic video views while Twitter indicated it saw more than 187 million Olympic-focused tweets.

Commercial Flights to Cuba Coming Soon?

Cuba announced this week it would be ready to begin receiving U.S. commercial flights as early as next week.

JetBlue will perform the inaugural flight August 31 after a more than half century of commercial flight cessation. This is the latest in a tourism boom for Cuba since a 2014 announcement that the U.S. and its Cold War enemy would normalize diplomatic ties. The first U.S. cruise ship to visit the island nation arrived earlier this year.

Instagram Stories, Snapchat Olympic Filters

Instagram Throws Down Gauntlet, Introduces Instagram Stories

Instagram StoriesInstagram stepped things up quite a bit this week with the introduction of “Instagram Stories”, which allows users to catalogue and share a number of pictures or videos taken throughout the day to help avoid “overposting.”
Instagram Stories work similar to Snapchat Stories in that they will disappear after 24 hours and allow users to draw on and add fun images to your content.

Already, some outlets are claiming Instagram Stories are superior to Snapchat Stories, but it remains to be seen if the new tool will add a nail in Snapchat’s coffin – as it clearly is meant to do.

Snapchat Goes for the Gold

Snapchat Olympics FiltersSpeaking of Snapchat, the social network is getting into the spirit of the Olympics with special filters, lenses and stickers. The Rio Summer Olympics (which kick off today) are also getting a special NBC Olympics channel on its Discover section to help users keep up on all of the excitement no matter where they are.

Snapchat is even curating Live Stories from some countries (U.S. included) that will highlight some great moments from the games.

Another interesting (and very cool, in my opinion) function will include country-specific geofilters that will automatically display medal counts by country. Of course, if you aren’t in Rio you’ll only be able to look on from afar, but at least Snapchat is making it interesting for those in attendance for the games!