Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Tuesday, January 20, 2009 at 12:54 PM PT

 

The Obama Inauguration Live Stream Stats

President Barack Obama’s inauguration was a global moment, not just in terms of history and politics but also web participation. And now, the numbers are starting to roll in for Inauguration Day web video traffic. Was it the largest live stream audience ever, as we had suspected? It’s hard to say just yet, since the streams were spread out amongst so many outlets. But here are the numbers so far.

akamaiinaugurationAkamai Technologies, which powers many sites including CNN, said it had its largest single day on record of concurrent live viewership, with 7 million active simultaneous streams (the majority of them live) at about 12:15 p.m. ET today. See the live traffic stats for yourself here.

Other stats from Akamai: The rate of traffic on it network hit more than 2 terabits per second traffic at 12:15 p.m; it delivered more than 12 million requests per second at the same time. Akamai said it also saw its largest-ever amount of Flash streams, with more than 800 Gbps of Flash streaming served. However, it looks like net usage was actually lighter than on November’s election night: 5.4 million peak visitors per minute as compared to 8.6 million for the election.

As of 1 p.m., MSNBC had served more than 14 million total video streams, with more than 9 million of them live and more than 5 million on-demand. Meanwhile, the site had more than 80 million page views as of 1 p.m. Update: MSNBC later reported 18.2 million video streams on the day.

Mogulus, which powered streams for USA Today and C-SPAN, said it broke a network record with 105,000 concurrent viewers and more than 1 million streams today.

We don’t have official numbers from Ustream, but there were about 1,500 viewers there when we checked, which was just as the main festivities were getting underway. Update: Ustream says it powered more than 3.8 million streams, with 400,000 concurrent visitors watching during the oath and speech.

As we reported earlier, CNN saw 13.9 million streams by 11:45 a.m., up from a previous live-streaming high of 5.3 million streams on election day. It hasn’t released concurrent viewer numbers yet. Facebook saw 600,000 status updates posted to the CNN.com Live Facebook feed by 12:30 p.m., and 8,500 status updates in the minute Obama began his speech. Update: CNN delivered more than 25 million live streams between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., with more than 1.3 million concurrent live streams just before Obama’s address, according to internal data supplied to Beet.TV.

Limelight had 2.5 million streams on the day, with a peak of more than 250 gigabytes per second of network traffic, according to data supplied to GigaOM.

ABC News had an all-time high of 8.3 million video views on ABCNEWS.com and its partner sites, including Yahoo! and Verizon VCast, on Jan. 20. That’s up more than 96 percent from the network’s previous video views high on Election Day in November.

The Associated Press showed 8 million live streams in its second-ever anchored webcast, a gigantic increase over its 80,000 streams on election night. With its video coverage distributed to hundreds of outlets, the AP had a peak of 374,000 concurrent streams.

Audi did especially well on the day, as the exclusive sponsor of webcasts on CBSNews.com, MSNBC.com, ABCNews.com and the WashingtonPost.com, according to Beet.TV. The automaker’s pre-roll ads were shown nearly 70 million times, with the following breakdown: ABCNews.com, 15.9 million; CBSNews.com, 11.4 million; MSNBC.com, 16.3 million; The Washington Post, 14 million; Slate, 9 million; and the Atlantic.com, 1.7 million.

Livestation had half a million streams, as well as a high level of activity in its chat rooms, especially Al Jazeera English, according to a spokesperson.

We’ve asked all the outlets included in our massive round-up of inauguration video resources for traffic stats, and will update this post as we get them.

For some points of reference, see our previous post about traffic records set by election night traffic in November.

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Topic: Online Video

Comments (2)

  • It was a historic day indeed with the inauguration of Barack Obama and now Obama will have to sit down and tackle the problems facing the United States of America. The economy, oil, jobs and two wars will all be Obama’s focal points during his historic first 90 days in office. The changing of the guard will hopefully equal an end to the crisis.

    How to Start a Business in California — 3:08 AM on January 21, 2009 Reply

  • Akamai did a great job for CNN. Two questions:
    1. why did the stream lag about 3 minutes?
    2. how much did the inauguration cost CNN for this streaming?

    vga with audio cables — 6:30 AM on January 21, 2009 Reply

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