The memorial service for pop star Michael Jackson delivered online video’s second biggest day, according to an assortment of gaudy numbers flowing in Tuesday and Wednesday.
The king of online video streaming remains the inauguration of President Obama.
During the Jackson service:
The wide-ranging content delivery network Akamaidelivered more than 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams (in Flash and Windows Media formats). Global traffic peaked at 3,924,370 visitors per minute, the company said. The load was about 2 terabits per second, the CDN said.
The Obama inauguration hit a peak of over 7 million active simultaneous streams, Akamai reported at the time. The CDN said global traffic was up about 20& during the service.
The CDN handles about 20% of the world’s Web traffic. A typical day’s peak would be something like 580,000 active streams.
CNN.com said it served up 9.7 million live video streams to 11.8 million unique visitors, in the period between 12 a.m. and 5 p.m. ET. CNN’s site hit a peak of 781,000 concurrent live streams, according to an online traffic report from the network.
Ustream reported 4.6 million total streams with 1.6 million total unique visitors. Its streams included one from CBS News. More than 12,000 messages per minute ran through its chat rooms. Ustream says its feed was the only one available on the iPhone.
Facebook saw 1 million users post about 800,000 “status updates” related to the Jackson memorial stream provided by CNN.
ABCNews.com, CBSNews.com, FoxNews.com and Hulu.com provided streams, to lesser numbers.
MSNBC.com said it served 3 million live streams of the event and a total of 19 million Jackson-related videos for the day. There were 7 million uniques during the service.
Hulu said its video streaming output was second only to the Obama ceremony. Hulu showed the Fox News feed.
Note: Different sources are reporting numbers for various time periods, but the above stats give the big picture.
In reaction to the big numbers, Akamai exec vp Robert Hughes had this quote moonwalked out to the media:
“When a public figure of global prominence such as Michael Jackson passes away, the public’s desire for up to date information and news is rarely satiated. Akamai’s network has seen a steady stream of online traffic when news of any sort related to Michael Jackson is updated, and we expected demand from a global online audience around the online streaming of his funeral would be no different.”
Update: Yahoo says it pumped out 5 million streams of the Jackson memorial, its biggest flow ever. During the Obama ceremony, it served up 1.8 million streams.
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