And the Survey Says...

According to Tim Leiweke at AEG, the company charged with organizing the Jackson memorial, they were expecting a huge global audience with over 1 billion viewers watching the service.

While the final numbers are still being tabulated, the general consensus was that people flocked to their computers and iPhones to watch the live event. Couldn’t you feel worker productivity slow to a crawl yesterday? I bet your boss enjoyed that, or maybe he/she wanted the day off too and decided to watch it with you. Either way, yesterday was a free pass to goof off at work (hope you enjoyed it because they don’t come often).

At its peak, global internet traffic was 33% above normal. Akamai, which is responsible for delivering more than 20% of the world’s internet traffic, said it was the second largest day of internet traffic on its network; with more than 4 million visitors per minute around the start of the funeral.

Other websites experienced high internet traffic. For example, CNN.com reported 81 million page views and over 9.7 million live video streams, which was less than the 27 million live streams they had during Obama’s inauguration. Alternatively, MSN.com reported 50% more people watched their live stream of the memorial than they did of the inauguration. Ustream reported that the live stream was the largest event ever hosted by the site, serving roughly 4.6 million video streams. Lastly, Yahoo reported 5 million streams. Overall, while traffic was up, I'm glad that people are more concerned about life and the progression of our people than death and pop culture.

Gomez Inc. is a website performance measuring company that keeps track of how the internet performs at undisclosed companies. The CTO, Imad Mouline, said that “In general the internet held up very nicely” despite feeds that were loading up to 11 seconds slower than average coupled with the constant re-buffering. I don’t know about you, but the constant re-buffering was annoying as I was still able to hear audio, but was looking at a still, fuzzy shot for over 5 seconds. After a few minutes, I had to shut it down because I felt like I was the little sister trying to jump on the shoulders of my older siblings to get a better view, but no one wanted to pick me up. While I’m proud of what the technology hopes to bring to the world, it has yet to meet my high expectations and causes me to question…WHO IS WORKING TO INCREASE OUR BANDWIDTH? They need to get with it.

Sources:
http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,25747892-23109,00.html

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1921446/how_many_people_watched_michael_jacksons.html?cat=15

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8139479.stm

http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/07/michael.jackson.web.traffic/index.html