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 of Italian music. The event is organized by Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), Italy’s main public broadcaster. The event is broadcast live throughout Italy 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 programs related to the event.
It finally landed on RAI’s streaming platform (RaiPlay) in 2017. The platform was created in 2016 after a restyle of the Rai.tv website and has been available for smart TVs since December 2016. But how much was this platform involved in the broadcast of Sanremo Festival 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 Namex’s Internet traffic for the Sanremo Festival 2022 and 2023, you 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.
Sanremo Festival 2024 ran from 6 to 10 February 2024. Let’s examine Internet traffic trends for Italy across the entire week. The opening evening (Tuesday), the cover evening (Friday) and the final evening (Saturday) were the most viewed. Figure 3 shows the difference between expected and real traffic.
Figure 4 details Friday evening and Saturday’s final traffic.
Regarding the three most important evenings of the festival, let’s take a look at Namex traffic trends. The quantity and shape confirm Cloudflare Radar’s data with the downward trend in traffic on the final evening of the event. In the Figures below, the blue line represents the expected traffic and the orange line represents the seen traffic.
The Sanremo Festival final is definitely the most viewed event. Saturday evening’s (missing) traffic was anticipated by an Inter vs Roma football match live streamed by DAZN in which there was a significant peak in Internet traffic through Namex. This traffic then suddenly dropped for the start of Sanremo Festival.
Viewing the whole week’s data (Figure 8) gives a more complete overview and a better idea of the difference in traffic.
From the data collected, it appears that end users prefer traditional TV to RaiPlay when given the option. It also appears they prefer the local Sanremo Festival to the usual evening entertainment offered by streaming platforms (such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video). Figure 9 shows an example of one of these services at Namex in the weeks leading up to and during the Sanremo Festival evenings. It’s easy to spot the drop in Internet traffic during the evenings.
During the Sunday press review, RAI published some interesting audience data related to the streaming platform RaiPlay showing that Saturday evening’s final was seen by around 800,000 people, an increase of roughly 126% compared to 2023 where there were 353,000. This shows that the number of people using the Internet for the enjoyment of content is increasing all the time. In Italy, the DAZN case as well as the distribution of the UEFA Champions League are a clear example.
As we’ve seen, however, despite an undeniable transition towards live streaming, digital terrestrial and satellite are still the most used platforms for live events when broadcast ‘free to air’ on traditional television. As the shift from satellite broadcast to live streaming on the Internet adds more and more services, we will need to wait several years before we’ll see the complete transition model.
Flavio Luciani is Chief Technology Officer at Namex (Roma IXP) and co-author of the book ‘BGP: from theory to practice‘.
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