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Streaming of Olympic Hockey Continues to Expand

With each succeeding United States Olympic hockey game from Sochi, Russia, this week, NBC Sports watched as the number of people streaming the game live grew.

On Wednesday, when the United States men’s team beat the Czech Republic, 798,337 people, or unique users, streamed the game on computers, tablets and smartphones.

On Thursday, when the Canadian women’s team defeated the United States in overtime in the gold medal game, the number swelled to 1.16 million.

Then, in the men’s semifinal on Friday, which started at noon Eastern, 2.1 million people streamed Canada’s 1-0 shutout of the United States, watching a total of 65 million minutes.

“It’s the biggest stream ever for NBC Sports and beats the Super Bowl two years ago, just barely,” said Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager for digital media at NBC Sports Group.

NBC had been concerned that office computer networks could be overloaded with people trying to stream the game from their desks at work. Too many people watching in the same office could cause the stream to slow and buffer, or even shut down.

Some used Twitter to complain.

“Currently watching USA/Canada vs. buffering,” @SeanOB19 wrote. “Either that or there is a lot more pausing in hockey than I remember.”

Some seemed to revel in it.

“Being a true American and watching live stream of the USA vs. Canada hockey on my iPad in class,” @anna2056 wrote.

Cordella said, “I looked at the Internet and only saw a few complaints.”

In digital parlance, the term unique users refers to the people who come and go during an event that is streamed. They might start it, leave during the intermissions and return.

Cordella estimated that if the United States had scored and sent the game into overtime, the number of unique users could have risen by as much as 40 percent.

Another measure, that of people watching the stream at any particular moment, indicated it was rising throughout the game and peaking at 850,000 at 2:09 p.m., just before the end.

Streaming is a significant part of NBC’s Olympic strategy. For the second Olympics in a row from Europe, it is streaming all the events live, believing, as other news media companies do, that it is critical to reach a population increasingly comfortable with watching programming apart from television.

“This bodes well for the N.H.L. playoffs,” Cordella said. “Hopefully, we’re breaking people into the new form of consumption and will stick around for more of our sports events.”

Over all, 9.1 million users have streamed live video from Sochi, up 24 percent from the 2012 London Games.

Live streaming is also viewed, more than ever, as a way to lift viewership in prime time, where most of the broadcast advertising is for the Olympics, even if it means the results are known in advance.

Through Thursday, the 14th day of coverage in Sochi, NBC averaged 22.5 million viewers, down 9 percent from the 2010 Vancouver Games, which were carried mostly live in the evening. But NBC prefers to point out that the Sochi figures are up 7 percent from the 2006 Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, which were also carried on a lengthy delay.

The Sochi viewership has been greater than Turin’s for all but three nights. On Thursday, 20.3 million viewers watched an evening of events that culminated with the women’s free skate won by Adelina Sotnikova in an upset over the Vancouver gold medalist, Kim Yu-na. On the comparable night in Turin, when an American, Sasha Cohen, won a silver medal, viewership averaged 25.7 million.

The network’s strategy has also been to use the Olympics to bring viewers to NBCSN. With live coverage of figure skating and hockey, NBCSN has seen its average viewership from 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. Eastern rise to 1.6 million, up 126 percent from the comparable days of the London Games two years ago.

Email: sandor@nytimes.com

Her Golden Age: Canada’s Hayley Wickenheiser, 35, will take a break from hockey after winning her fourth gold but may not retire: “I feel like I’ve got a lot left. “

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section D, Page 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Streaming of Hockey Continues to Expand. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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