In what will surely be the be the biggest day in Internet history, CNN.com has seen historic traffic for its live feed. Today, as of 11:45 a.m. there were 14 million streams, nearly three times the biggest day, which was the past election day.
Update: CNN.com streamed an incredible 19 million individual streams of the speech. Msnbc.com had 9 million live streams, also a record.
Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch likes the integration of CNN with his Facebook page.The traffic surge was not without some problems as Erick mentions in his post, citing Kevin Rose who complained about buffering problems. We think that the Facebook collaboration sent a torrent of traffic to CNN. Wildly successful cross promotion.
Watching from our Manhattan office, Kelsey saw a "perfect" stream from CNN.com. She logged on at around 11:30.
I logged on and off as I was checking out other sites. Reentering CNN during the Obama speech, I saw some buffering of the image and a temporary lack of access to stream with message up about temporary lack of access. I heard that others had trouble getting the stream during the speech.
The other giant live streaming site, msnbc.com seems to have had some similar issue. One of my colleagues at the office who logged-on early, saw a perfect stream. Another who logged-on later found that there was latency in the stream — where buffering delayed the speech by several minutes.
A spokesperson for msnbc.com acknowledged some latency issues in streaming the speech, but said that engineers were "quick to identify and resolve the issues."
We have heard from friends that accessing the CBSNews.com stream was difficult at certain points.
It appears that to ensure a stable stream, it's best to log-on early. There are differences in processing speeds of computers, connectivity issues, local ISP's and other factors. It wasn't perfect, but it was a historic day for online video news consumption.
More to come.
UPDATED CNN.COM TRAFFIC
DATA: According to early data, as of 3:30p
ET today, CNN.com has generated more than 136 million page views, while CNN.com
Live served more than 21.3 million live video streams globally since 6a,
shattering its all time total daily streaming record set on Election Day with
5.3 million live streams. (Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, global). Additionally,
CNN.com Live estimates it served more than 1.3 million concurrent live streams
during its peak, which occurred immediately prior to President Obama’s inaugural
address. (Source: Internal CDN monitoring data).
Please comment on your viewing experience of the Inauguration online.
Update:
Andy Plesser, Executive Producer
