Live Earth Sets Live Event Streaming Record
Microsoft reported that users requested more than 9 10 million streams of Saturday’s Live Earth concerts, setting a streaming record for a live online concert.
Users logging on and off request new streams, thus the total unique audience will be lower. However, previous events have generated more streams in the days immediately following an event. Live 8, the last even produced by Control Room, generated more than 100 million streams in the six weeks following the event.
UPDATED 10:30 PM EDT
As Dan Rayburn keenly notes in the comments, Microsoft is actually claiming a record based on a number of simultaneous streams which was never released. To put things in perspective, Live 8 generated 175,000 peak simultaneous streams. We are eagerly awaiting a response on this.
July 8th, 2007 at 8:56 pm
No such thing as a “record” webcast as most webcasts don’t provide any real numbers after the fact. Much like MSN with this one. How many unique streams? How many simultaneous? At what bitrate(s)? Average length of time? etc…
Only way MSN or anyone can call something a “record” is if you have data from all webcasts and compare apples to apples, which never happens. Each time Apple does a Jobs webcast, the always put out a release like “Apple Delivers Record-Breaking Webcast of Macworld Keynote”. Record based on what?
July 8th, 2007 at 9:15 pm
Dan, you have a point, the most relevant metric is max concurrent viewers, and they didn’t release that number (shocker) which is also the basis of their claim.
The release says “the most simultaneous viewers of any online concert ever.” But they only announced the total number of streams so they’re claiming a record based on a number which they never released.
The headline they were going for of 10 million viewers, I believe, but it isn’t a good metric. They had multiple simultaneous streams by country. So every time someone clicked off the concert in New York to see one elsewhere that added up to 10 million + views. And I’d be willing to bet everyone did this a couple of times.
So the question to ask is, what was that “record-breaking” number of simultaneous streams. Microsoft? Control Room? Akamai? Anyone?
July 8th, 2007 at 9:42 pm
Dan -
You are correct, of course. The metrics and methodology are weak. But at least they put out a number. I’m still waiting for VH-1’s PR folks to get back to me on how many streams, users, etc., they delivered for the Concert for Diana last week. Hopefully the good folks at Keynote (www.keynote.com) will put out some news shortly.
July 9th, 2007 at 1:54 pm
Akamai didn’t do any of the streaming, only the “on demand Web infrastructure” as per the release they put out, so the data would have to come from MSN who from what I understand, served everything from some eco-friendly co-lo facility.
Also, from what I understand, Keynote does not put out any numbers that talk to traffic or visitors for video, they only put out numbers based on the quality and availability of the content.
July 9th, 2007 at 3:21 pm
When I watched the live stream directly on the URL I pulled off the page it was running through an edge suite URL. Akamai is also the only company (that I know of) with a large enough global network to reliably distribute content on the scale that this was done.
Though understandably, I’m sure Akamai and Keynote are not permitted to release the numbers on their end without permission from their clients, that was just wishful thinking on my part.
I have a call into MSN regarding the peak concurrent number but I’m not very optimistic I will hear back.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:20 pm
[...] released updated figures for Live Earth since last weekend, and they are very impressive. More people viewed the concert online than on [...]