With the Rio 2016 Summer Olympics in full swing, we wondered about the amount of imagery that would be created during the event.
It was fairly easy to find out that Getty images predicted it would produce approximately 1.5 million images during the games. We also read that it would only take 120 seconds from snapping the photo to broadcasting it to Getty’s customers.
This got us thinking: what about the images created by the spectators in the tribunes? There was no official data, so we got to work and crunched the numbers ourselves. We won’t bore you with the details – all you need to know is that our calculations are based on the average media production by the users of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and WhatsApp, cross-referenced with the size of the Olympics audience.
We then converted all this data into the currency we most often work with: mega-, giga- and terabytes, and then adjusted this to an average upload speed of 500 Mbit/sec to see how long it would take to upload all the Olympics media into a pCloud account (or a few). To make it even more fun, we then compared this time to the best times of some of the Rio 2016 most prominent athletes – Michael Phelps, Katy Ledecky, Taylor McKeown, Usain Bolt, Michelle Jenneke and Ashton Eaton.
It only seemed appropriate, given how you can actually snap a few photos at the start of the men’s 200 m individual medley, and upload it by the time Phelps finishes 1:54 min later. Enjoy!
