2.5 Million Watch Big Brother Online

Over 2.5m people have watched Big Brother live over the internet since the website went live last Friday.

The fly on the wall site, which received over 200m hits last year (see Big Brother Website Makes It Into August Top Ten), saw 350,000 people down loading live footage from the house on its opening day, with the figure rising to 460,000 on Sunday. According to Channel 4 an average of 8,000 people a second have followed events by downloading one of four live streams on to their PC.

Head of interactive media, Chris Short said: “Following Saturday night’s 9 o’clock introductory show, the Big Brother website saw viewing figures rise to match last year’s biggest ever peak. Just two days after going live we have already had to cope with the kind of traffic generated by Nasty Nick’s eviction.”

Last year the Big Brother website reached 1.5m page impressions in its first weekend with an average of 3m daily hits throughout the series. Nasty Nick’s judgement day saw a peak of 10m helping to make Big Brother the most popular entertainment site on the web.

The success looks set to be repeated this year as internet viewers can tune into ‘Fav-cam’ a constant video stream dedicated to the most popular contestant, take part in opinion polls and cast their eviction votes online. Die hard fans can even sign up to receive the latest news updates direct to their computer.

The website was developed for Channel 4 by Endemol UK and Terra-Lycos.

Channel 4: 020 7396 4444 www.bigbrother.terra.com

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