Inauguration sets records for online video streaming

Yesterday, a staggering number of people watched online videos of the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44^th President of the United States. We reported on some good places to watch online videos of the ceremony, and many of those sites saw record traffic levels for their video content.

CNN.com reported streaming 21.3 million online video streams in nine hours yesterday, reaching 1.3 million simultaneous streams, according to the New York Times. Akamai, a content delivery network that handles video traffic for many major media sites, said it delivered more than 7 million streams at once during Obama's inaugural address. These figures topped the previous high, set during Election Day 2008.

As we reported last week, CNN and Facebook partnered to deliver social networking functionality around online video streams of the event. A Facebook spokeswoman told the Boston Globe that 600,000 comments were posted during the inauguration, which is significant, but not extraordinary.

MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com also experienced heavy traffic, streaming 14 million and 5 million online videos respectively during the ceremony, according to the Boston Globe.

While the uptake of online video for news delivery is encouraging for the medium, the record traffic also exposed areas of weakness in large-scale delivery of online video content. Many sites reported logjams that prevented some viewers from being able to access video streams of the event. Some of this was due to record numbers of visitors requesting large video streams at once, but it also shows that broadband capacity has to increase in the U.S. in order to optimize online video delivery.

On another note, a day after the next leader of the country was sworn in, FierceOnlineVideo "inaugurates" a new series of interviews with leaders in the online video space. An interview with Brightcove CEO Jeremy Allaire is the first installment in the series, which will run weekly. Let us know if you'd like to recommend someone for the series. We're looking for engaging executives who have led their company to success and growth in online video, so send us an email if you can think of a qualified candidate. 

- Pete