Swearing In Internet TV

UPDATED: Most people surely watched the 44th U.S. president take office on regular television. But live video over the Internet delivered another solid proof point yesterday during President Obama’s inauguration.

According to CNN’s preliminary internal data, CNN.com served more than 36.7 million total video streams on Inauguration Day. Of those, 26.9 million were live, including 1.3 million simultaneous streams right before Obama gave his address – obliterating CNN.com’s previous record on Election Day with 5.3 million live streams. Between 6 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. ET yesterday, CNN.com had served more than 21.3 million live video streams.

Meanwhile, Akamai Technologies, the Internet CDN, said it delivered a peak of more than 7 million active simultaneous streams during President Obama’s swearing-in ceremony, at approximately 12:15 p.m. ET yesterday. That’s around the record highs for Akamai, which also said total traffic on its nodes at that time surpassed 2 terabits per second and that it delivered over 12 million requests per second.

Limelight Networks, another big CDN, said it delivered President Obama’s address live over the Internet to an estimated 2.5 million viewers.

Again, this is not an indication that millions of people will ditch cable TV in favor of getting everything on the ‘Net. But the availability of live and on-demand video online is a trend that appears to be only accelerating.