Michael Jackson funeral delivers pop in video streams
Updated: Live video streams of the Michael Jackson funeral are delivering a big jump in activity and some sites are struggling under the strain.
According to Akamai's live stream tracker, a handy link of current activity, the Jackson funeral is getting a lot of attention. And anecdotally the sites that have garnered a lot of Jackson-related interest---Twitter, Ustream, which is broadcasting CBS coverage, CNN and a bevy of others---are holding up but spotty at times. CBS owns ZDNet. For what it's worth the Ustream video feed is performing better than the stream at CBSNews.com.
Here's a look at the bump in streams (Akamai delivers 20 percent of Web's traffic):
Facebook is also reporting some stats on traffic tied to the Michael Jackson event, tied to CNN's use of Facebook Connect and the Live Stream box. As of 10:30 a.m. PDT, CNN and Facebook had seen 500,000 status updates, 300,000 users logged in and approximately 6,000 status updates per minute. Facebook also noted that the Michael Jackson page has grown to nearly 7 million fans, about 1 million more than President Obama's Faecbook page.
And some other notable stats:
- As of 3 p.m. EDT, the 24 hour live peak stream was a little more than 2 million. On an average day, that tally is about 390,000.
- The Jackson funeral (assuming most of the streaming traffic is due to that event) is delivering more than 9 million global hits per second. North American and Europe represented more than half of those hits.
- The monthly peak for hits per second was June 2 (Jackson's death) at 7.7 million. The funeral handily tops that sum. From Dec. 2008 the monthly peak is anywhere from 7 million to 8 million hits per second. The exception---the Obama inauguration, which delivered a peak of more than 12 million hits per second, on Jan. 20. So far, it looks like the Obama stream record is safe.
- Measured by global visitors per minute the Jackson funeral trumps Obama's record by about 20 million users or so.
Update: Statistics are being tallied, but Keynote Systems, which monitors mobile and Web traffic, reports the following:
- Most sites were unaffected by the more than 1 million online viewers of the Jackson memorial service;
- The Jackson event was in contrast to the Obama inauguration, which slowed the Internet;
- However, if sites hosted live news coverage of the Jackson service performance took a hit.
Keynote says:
According to Keynote’s Online News Performance Index, the average time it took to download the home page jumped by 20%, from an average download time of 4.25 seconds to 5.5 seconds. Some sites took as long as 18 seconds to download. During this same period, the average availability the Online News Performance Index saw a drop from roughly 100% to 96% with some sites dropping under 80%. (Web site Availability is defined as being able to download all page content of a given site, including images, ads, JavaScript, etc. in less than 60 seconds.)
Keynote's news index includes ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, Google News, Fox News and Yahoo News among other large outlets. The performance hit looked like this:
And then there's the latest view from Akamai, which indicates video normalcy has returned.
