Hundreds of thousands of Australians ditched the TV and opted to live stream the Melbourne Cup in what some are calling the largest ever live-streamed event in Australia.
But as live streaming viewers reached historic highs with the race day launch of Plus7, Seven and Yahoo7's new live streaming app, the channel's television audience fell from 2014's 2.122 million to 2.07 million.
Seven will likely put this decline down to its new streaming audience, as it revealed that 488,000 people streamed coverage across the day and 300,000 concurrent streams were recorded during the main race, which saw Michelle Payne reach a momentous victory as the first female jockey to win the cup.
Ed Harrison, CEO of Yahoo7, said the Melbourne Cup was the ideal launch day for the app.
"To launch live streaming on Plus7 with record breaking numbers demonstrates the demand for this service, and we're excited to add even more great features as we continue to grow Plus7,” he said.
Clive Dickens, Seven’s chief digital officer, added: “Yesterday, Seven and Yahoo7 made TV history - the race that stops the nation did not break the internet, but it did break streaming records. Now we are streaming all of our channels 24/7, we can't wait to bring the Australian Open and Olympics to millions more mobile Australians next year.”
David Habben, chief media strategist for Akamai Technologies in Asia Pacific, said stats showed that the event was “likely the largest online event of its kind in Australia.”
“To put that into perspective, the audience of over 300,000 was more than three times larger than the Australian live stream of the Fifa World Cup, and almost double the peak traffic."
On TV, the Melbourne Cup and the race presentation both topped all major television demographics including 16-39, 18-49 and 25-54 age brackets. The race presentation pulled in 1.79 million viewers.
Feeling a bit of a race day hangover might be Bohemia, whose data intelligence platform 'The Brain' again failed to pick this year's Melbourne Cup winner.
Bohemia's group data and attribution director, Steve Wright, told AdNews on Melbourne Cup day that more people are now on The Brain's team and it took outside advice to ensure The Brain would come up with the goods on race day.
The Brain put Criterion in first place, followed by Trip to Paris and Bondi Beach. In reality, Prince of Penzance, Max Dynamite and Criterion scored top place joy.
This morning, Wright told AdNews Bohemia does not view the results as a defeat for 'The Brain'.
"We feel third is pretty respectable. Experts hadn’t given Criterion much hope given that he had never run the distance before, however we believed that everything else the data told us would counteract that argument."
"I think third place goes some way to proving that the data we evaluate in the model helps make a more informed decision ...What a brilliant story it is for Michelle Payne to win this year and only adds to the charm of the big race. Criterion may not have won but we couldn’t have been beaten by anyone more deserving!" he added.
The race was the fifth most talked about sporting event of the year according to Nielsen Twitter TV Rating. In total there were 7.7 million Tweet impressions across Twitter and the web.
Here's how some brands got in on the race day action:
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