Sanremo and Internet traffic in Italy from the perspective of an Internet eXchange Point
15/02/2024
By Flavio Luciani, Chief Technology Officer at Namex
The Sanremo Festival is the most important and prestigious music event in Italy. It’s an Italian song festival held annually in Sanremo, a city on the Ligurian coast. The festival was inaugurated in 1951 and has since become a staple for Italian music. The event is organized by RAI (Radiotelevisione Italiana), Italy’s main public broadcaster and is broadcast live throughout the country and in Eurovision.
The Sanremo Festival debuted in 1951 as a radio event. The first editions were broadcast on radio by RAI. In 1955, the Festival made its debut on television, while maintaining the radio broadcast. RAI held the exclusive rights to broadcast the festival on both radio and television. Despite the competition, RAI continued to hold the main broadcasting rights to the Sanremo Festival. However, agreements were made with private broadcasters to co-produce or broadcast side programmes related to the event.
It finally landed on RaiPlay (RAI’s streaming platform) in 2017. The platform was created in 2016 after a restyle of the Rai.tv website and has been available for smartTVs since December 2016.
But how much was this platform involved in the broadcast of Sanremo 2024?
First of all I would like to point out that the event was broadcast by RAI through both traditional TV and live streaming on RaiPlay. Usually, when an event is not broadcast exclusively on the Internet, traditional TV has the upper hand.
This has also been the case in past years, and looking at the Internet traffic of Namex (Sanremo 2022 and 2023) one can clearly see that the classic evening peak that usually reflects the use of entertainment services (whether on-demand or live streaming such as DAZN) is missing.
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Let’s have a look at the trend for the entire week considering all Internet traffic generated in Italy. The Cloudflare radar graph helps me with this. The opening evening (Tuesday), the cover evening (Friday) and the final evening (Saturday) were the most viewed, and in fact the following graph clearly shows the difference between expected and real traffic.
Here is a zoom on Friday evening and Saturday’s final.
Still considering the three important evenings of the festival, let’s take a look at Namex traffic trends. Quantity and shape confirm the above with an increase in depression on the final evening of the event. In the graphs below, the blue line represents the expected traffic.
The views expressed by the authors of this blog are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of LACNIC.