Inauguration Day is over. Cell-phone networks and the Web are still standing, but the coverage of such a huge event may never be the same.
On the Web, new records were set for news and other sites as the medium adjusted to enormous demands for coverage. Akamai Technologies said Tuesday was “the largest day ever for the delivery of concurrent live streaming” over its platform, which is used to provide expandable video-streaming capacity for many large Web sites.
At 12:15 p.m. EST, just as the oath of office was being taken, Akamai reported a peak of more than seven million simultaneous streams, delivering more than two terabits per second.
‘Just the Beginning’
Robert Hughes, executive vice president of global sales at Akamai, said the record number of streams was due, in part, to the event occurring during workday hours and being watched in offices. “This is just the beginning of what is possible when broadcasting live to audiences around the world,” he said.
CNN.com Live served 25 million video streams through 12 hours yesterday, blasting its previous record of 5.3 million streams over 24 hours on Election Day. But the cable news network couldn’t accommodate everyone, so there was an online “waiting room” that delayed requests for video streams for as long as 20 minutes. Similarly, social networks Twitter and Facebook also reported record traffic.
On CBSNews.com’s Political Hotsheet, James M. Klatell wrote that the “much talked-about online video coverage of the event almost ground to a halt.” He added that perhaps “we’re not as far into the Internet age as we thought, because for the 20 or so minutes surrounding the big moment, it was hard, if not impossible,” to watch it live online. He reported that CBSNews.com experienced streaming difficulties around the time of the swearing-in because of the volume.
Cell Networks Survived
The cell-phone…