Since the opening of the Olympic Games the online video has become the mainstream way for Internet users to catch the Games. According to statistics Tencent has been continuously breaking online video live broadcast ratings records for the Olympics Channel. Everyday more than 10 million viewers have been watching the online video live broadcast. The first workday after the Olympics opening ceremony August 9th saw close to 30 million hits to the Tencent Olympics video channel.

The current Games is the first ever Olympics to be broadcast live on the Internet. According to iResearch 46.1% of Internet users choose the Internet as their main information source for the Olympics greatly exceeding the 34.5% of viewers who still rely on TV for the latest from the Olympics.

As early as February 17th 2007 the Spring Festival Gala was featured in what the industry called China’s first nation-level exercise of online video live broadcast. Three P2P platforms logged a total of 11.39 million visits. Up to 1.4 million people watched the gala live online simultaneously the highest ratings record for simultaneous online broadcast in China.

During the Beijing Olympics opening ceremony on August 8 however QQ.com broke the earlier ratings record by logging 1.5859 million simultaneous viewers and 20.2266 million visits. During a press interview the Olympics Channel director Wang Yongzhi said "QQ.com can now provide the best online video service in the industry by relying on the company’s powerful technical support and exclusive resources."

Analysts stress that QQ.com’s two exclusive core advantages reside in the company’s vast user base and instant news delivery. Instant delivery of gold-winning news is an especially attractive incentive for Internet users to follow up on links. According to a survey conducted by Tsinghua University’s Media Research Laboratory 65.28% of Internet users learned news of China’s first gold medal via QQ.com. According to a recently published research by ACNielsen of the mainstream internet users ranging from 18 to 30 who obtained gold-winning news via the Internet at the first time 58% learned about gold-winning news via QQ.com leading far ahead of such Internet portals as Sina.com and Sohu.com.