Obama's inauguration sets online video-streaming record

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States, arguably the most watched event or show on television ever, also set a record for the most simultaneous streaming-video viewers in the web's history, says content delivery network Akamai Technologies.

According to Akamai, around 7.7 million video streams, mainly live, were being seen at peak time on Tuesday, 20 January. As it happened to be a working day for a number of Americans, the company says that part of the reason for that number being so high was that a number of them watched the swearing-in ceremony online on their computer screens rather than on a television.

In a statement, Akamai's executive vice president of global sales and marketing said that the historic nature of the inauguration virtually ensured that the event drove "unprecedented demand from a global online audience."

"With the inauguration occurring during workday hours in the US, we witnessed record numbers of live streams served in support of many leading news businesses."

Video from the inauguration ceremony and allied events streamed all over the Web by online video hubs such as Hulu and other streaming sites like Ustream to sites of major news outlets.

Demand was reported to have been unprecedented, with CNN.com having to cut off viewers and set up a waiting list. Reports suggested that data from CNN.com captured the uniqueness of the online surge. CNN was reported to have said that it provided over 21.3 million video streams over nine hours ramping up to mid-afternoon, way past the record of 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day.

Jennifer Martin, spokeswoman for CNN.com was quoted by reports as saying that at its peak, the site fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously.

Reports said that an average of around 4,000 users updated their status every minute, with over 8,500 posting new updates the minute Obama began his speech. In all, Facebook reported 1.5 million status updates through the CNN portal alone. Obama's official Facebook fan page got over four million visitors, and around half a million posts on the comments section. Reports said that his MySpace page now features over one million "friends."

Moreover, by night on 20 January 2009, over 40,000 photos of events from Capitol Hill tagged with the word "inauguration" were posted on Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing site Flickr. Twitter, which did not exist when the last time a US president was sworn-in, saw a flurry of activity with millions of users posting their comments about the inauguration.

The event, along with the recent crash-landing of US Airways jet in the Hudson River, pushed the site's traffic over popular content aggregation site Digg.