ITTF 2014 World Team Table Tennis Championships Goes Viral

The ZEN-NOH 2014 World Team TableTennis Championships are officially the most followed World Table TennisChampionships in history.

There were 475 combined hours of coverage across 22 TV networks acrossthe globe, including an impressive 50 hours just on China CentralTelevision (CCTV).

These 50 hours on CCTV were watched by a combined total of 188 millionpeople, and the women's final had an average viewership of 11.3 million,making it the 2nd most watched sporting programme (not taking into accountthe Winter Olympics) in China in 2014.

The Championships were also seen live in countries such as Singapore,Malaysia, Japan, Chinese Taipei, USA, Mexico, right across Africa and theMiddle East through Al Jazeera, and in Europe though Eurosport, plus manymore worldwide.

Reflecting on the Championships, ITTF President Adham SHARARA stated:"I am extremely pleased that our promotional efforts resulted in suchextensive media attention on all media platforms. I am also pleased withthe regained popularity of our sport in Japan with a full house ofspectators, which is a good sign for our sport for the 2020 Olympics. Ihope that we can maintain this momentum and receive even more media andpublic attention next year in Suzhou, China."

In addition to the millions of eyes watching Tokyo 2014 on TV, therewere almost a million viewers that watched the championships live and ondemand on ITTF's streaming platform, itTV.

The excitement for the 52nd World Championships was not limited to TVand streaming, with 6,284 different media articles in print and on theInternet being published across the world by the 904 accredited media onsite and the thousands of press following the event off site.

During the Championships, fans flocked to ITTF's official websiteITTF.com in record numbers to make it the second most popular OlympicInternational Federation website behind FIFA.

#TTokyo2014 was also the biggest table tennis event of all time interms of social media, with millions of people liking, sharing, tweeting,watching and commenting on the event.

ITTF videos on YouTube, which included live streaming of the lowerdivisions, received 4.2 million views, which was double last year'sviewership.

The official ITTF hashtag for the event, #TTokyo2014, was used bythousands prior, during and after the event, and ITTF's Facebook pagereceived 10 million page impressions, which was over 3 times more than the2013 World Championships.

All of this in an eight day period! We look forward to the next editionof the World Table Tennis Championships in Suzhou, China in April2014.

Find out more about the International Table Tennis Federation at ITTF.com

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