The Super Bowl Gave the Web the Night Off

February 4, 2013 at 11:23 am PT

Yes, you could stream the Super Bowl on the Web yesterday. But most of you didn’t. And while a lot of you were tweeting or Facebooking during the game, a lot of you stayed away from the Web during the game, period.

Here, via broadband service company Sandvine, is what happened to Web traffic during the game, at an unnamed East Coast-based ISP:

Overall, Sandvine says, network usage was down 15 percent during the game. And that makes plenty of sense. Though it would have been interesting to see what had happened if the 49ers hadn’t shown up, post-blackout, and decided to make it an actual competition.

Also not-that-surprising-but-still-interesting: Those of you who did tune into CBS’s livestream (and bonus features) did it more often when there was something interesting to watch — like Beyonce, or Colin Kaepernick running at super speed.