Volume of mobile tweets at Games so high it interfered with Olympic broadcast

• By Robert Andrews - paidContent

Irony of ironies – after encouraging fans to tweet copiously, the International Olympic Committee requests London 2012 attendees limit their output only to “urgent” status updates. The problem – mobile updates from some attendees have clogged a mobile network used by official TV data suppliers.

photo: Nick J Webb

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) and Twitter have worked closely in recent weeks to promote the microblog service as a means to engage with athletes, competitions and London 2012. But mobile social media users are proving so voluminous at some Olympic venues that they are now interfering with mobile networks on which the games themselves depend, the IOC says.
During Olympic cycling road races this weekend, television broadcasters say they were let down by a lack of official timing data supplied by the Olympic Broadcasting Service (OBS). One BBC commentator relied on his own stopwatch.
IOC communications director said (via Guardian.co.uk): “From my understanding, one network was oversubscribed, and OBS are trying to spread the load to other providers.”
Adams did not name the underperforming network. And his plea to tweeters, in the circumstances, goes against the social media project the IOC had tried to create: “We don’t want to stop people engaging in this by social media and sending updates, but perhaps they might consider only sending urgent updates.”
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