The BBC has released some statistics on its blog looking at how its web site fared during the Olympics with audiences. Online video, turned out to be particularly successful for the broadcaster, which reported that up to 45 percent of the Olympics audience engaged with video from the Olympics site. It served up 50 million sport video streams during the Olympics, which averaged out at about three million per day, peaking at 5.5 million on Tuesday 19th August. The results are a massive validation of its April switch to embedded videos in Flash. Before, videos would appear in a separate pop-up window using either Real or Windows Media.

SEE ALSO: BBC Beats Records For Olympics Traffic On Video, Mobile Surge

Other Figures:

— BBC audiences watched nearly 9.7 million hours of Olympic video on the website. At regular times, there were over 100,000 viewers watching at the same time. The peak stayed at just under 200,000 across live and on demand videos.

— Online viewers watched live video for about 15 minutes a day, and dipped in and out of on demand clips for about three minutes, 20 seconds per day.

— More users watched the video of the 100 meter final in which Jamaican runner Usain Bolt sprinted to an easy victory than read the text story. While 33,500 accessed the text story, 54,357 viewed the video. Meanwhile, this was still a fraction of the TV audience for the race, which pulled in an all time high audience of 5.8 million viewers.