Over the course of the last several years, the National Basketball Association has worked to make live and on-demand streams of its games available online and on a growing number of mobile and connected devices. That effort has paid off in the latest season, with the league clocking more website visitors and video streams over the course of the 2010/2011 season and postseason than ever before.
According to Turner Broadcasting, (s TWX) which manages NBA.com and all other digital distribution points for the league, the postseason visitors to NBA sites grew to 401 million, which is an increase of 11 percent over last year. But the number of videos watched increased even more, with viewers tuning into 141 million streams over the course of the NBA playoffs, up 89 percent.
That capped off a record year for visitors and online video views for the league in general. Over the season and postseason, NBA.com had more than 8 billion page views, which was an increase of more than 33 percent. Meanwhile, the league reported more than 2.7 billion video streams during the year, which was an increase of more than 133 percent.
In addition to NBA.com, the league has made its videos available through applications on a number of mobile and connected TV platforms. The NBA GameTime app is available on the iPhone, iPad, (s AAPL) BlackBerry, (s RIMM) and Android (s GOOG) mobile devices, as well as connected devices such as Apple TV, Google TV, Roku, Vizio, LG, Panasonic and Samsung. The league reported that it saw a 90-percent increase in the number of app downloads across all platforms versus last year.
Despite the growth in video streams and availability of online content, the number of viewers who tuned in to watch the games doesn’t appear to have been affected. In fact, the 2011 playoffs on TNT were the highest-rated in cable history. Meanwhile, the 15.0 overnight Nielsen rating that game six of the finals got was 22 percent higher than the deciding game in last year’s Lakers-Celtics matchup.