Michael Jackson memorial streams top 2 million

Average of 3.3 million visits per minute

8 July 2009 9:18 GMT / By Duncan Geere

The web stream of Michael Jacksons memorial has turned out to be one of the biggest ever online video events, with streaming company Akamai delivering 2,185,000 live and on-demand streams over the course of the evening.

Total traffic, the company says, surpassed 2 terabits per second, and at its peak, the site was receiving 3.9 million visitors per minute. Averaged over the duration of the event, the site got 3.3 million hits per minute.

According to Twitter trend trackers Twist, Michael Jackson tweets hit more than 8% of total tweets on the service. Facebook says that one million users posted 800,000 status updates during the memorial. For comparison, during Obama's inauguration there were 1.8 million updates with "Obama" in.

It seems like traffic for the memorial event wasn't quite as high as on the day of the King of Pop's death, and it wasn't as massive as Obama's inauguration, but it was still one of the largest ever web events.

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