Web weathers celebrity send-off
Posted: Tuesday, July 07, 2009 2:05 PM by Alan Boyle
Clemens Bilan / AFP - Getty Images |
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Fans of Michael Jackson weep in the German city of Cologne on Tuesday as they
watch the public memorial service for "The King of Pop" on large video screens.
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Chastened by Inauguration Day's online video breakdowns, Web sites bulked up their capacity to handle the crush of traffic for pop star Michael Jackson's memorial service on Tuesday - and statistics showed that the bits flowed at mostly manageable levels.
When President Barack Obama took office on Jan. 20, so many people were watching online that some sites couldn't keep up with the flow. The benchmark number for that day was 7.2 million active streams, as recorded by Akamai, a Massachusetts-based company that handles high-traffic events for a long list of Web sites, including msnbc.com.
Tuesday's active-stream count passed the 2 million mark shortly after the 10 a.m. PT service began, and rose as time went on. What's more, those video viewers shifted their focus from recorded clips ("on demand") to the live streams.
The count surpassed 2.5 million at 11 a.m., and hovered around 2.77 million at 11:50 a.m. After the service ended and the mourners moved on, the count drifted down to 2.5 million at 1:15 p.m and sank below 1.7 million just before 2 p.m. PT. By that time, the on-demand video streams outnumbered the live streams.
Celebrities from the entertainment world were clearly the draw during the Webcast: Akamai's real-time video-stream count slumped slightly when the Rev. Al Sharpton took the stage (OK, he's a fiery orator, but can he sing?), then rebounded when singer/songwriter/guitarist John Mayer took his place. The ups and downs could serve as an instant rating service for a particular star's appeal. (Sharpton at -20 per second, Mayer at +40. Brooke Shields started out at +10 but fell to -20 as her tribute went on. Martin Luther King III came in at -80.)
Whether it was Stevie Wonder or Sharpton, Mayer or Shields, the Webcast was clearly the draw on the Web: Akamai's tally of traffic to the news sites in its network peaked at 3.9 million visitors per minute just before the service started, then dropped off - suggesting that Web users were passing up static Web pages to focus on the pages that offered video. In comparison, Akamai said the peak visitors-per-minute rate for June 25, the day Jackson died, was 4.2 million.
Massive media convergence
The overall Web traffic figures for the Michael Jackson saga have generally fallen short of the peaks registered during last November's election coverage, Inauguration Day and prime sports events such as the NCAA basketball playoffs.
But when it comes to Michael Jackson and his legacy, the real action is in the convergence of cable TV, online video, blogs and social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook. The flurry of tweets about #MichaelJackson on June 25 put a heavy load to Twitter's 140-character-at-a-time social network (which was also humming with #iranelection tweets).
Facebook reported that its users were averaging 6,000 status updates per minute during the memorial service - which was roughly 2,000 more per minute than the average for the Inauguration Day ceremonies.
Msnbc.com set up a hybrid interface that let users tweet about the event while they were watching it on video (and earned a "Streamie" for the effort).
In addition to the online action, big screens around the world carried the video signal from the service, Michael Jackson fans gathered around television sets to share the experience, and Cinedigm Digital Cinema Network beamed the event to more than 80 movie theaters nationwide.
Alan Wurtzel, chief of research at NBC Universal, told The Associated Press that the Michael Jackson coverage represented "the first multiplatform-significant culture event." (NBC Universal is a partner in the msnbc.com joint venture.)
No big impact on the intertubes
As the day proceeded, Akamai tweeted its traffic statistics on a regular basis. California-based Keynote Systems, which monitors mobile-device and Internet performance, was also watching the flow of data traffic closely. Keynote's senior director for external operations, Shawn White, told me in an e-mail before the service that he wouldn't be surprised if some of the video streams suffered degradation because of high traffic.
But there was no major impact on the Internet's overall performance. "So far we are seeing some slowdowns on The Keynote News Web Site Performance Index," Keynote spokesman Dan Berkowitz said in an e-mail just after noon PT Tuesday. "Overall, the Internet is performing OK (that is based on The Keynote Business 40 Web Performance Index)."
Although the overall Internet easily handled the load, data monitors cautioned that individual network users might experience slowdowns because of localized traffic jams - for example, on your company's computer network. "The IT folks in my office are blaming our slow processing speed on the online streaming," one of my Facebook friends told me.
On the mobile-phone front, Verizon Wireless reported that attempts to connect with the company's voice network between 10 a.m. and noon PT Tuesday were up 10 percent over Monday's comparable levels, and data attempts (for texting and Web use) were up 86 percent. "The networks worked perfectly normally," Verizon's Debi Lewis reported in an e-mail.
Video traffic
Early Tuesday, Keynote's White said Michael Jackson's memorial service would likely rank just behind Inauguration Day on the list of significant online news events. (The 9/11 terror attacks of 2001 ranks third on White's list - in part because they took place when Web-based media, and particularly online video, weren't as mature as they are today.)
"With the inauguration, there was so much expectation and hype, anticipation and excitement," White said in his e-mail. "Also, most schools throughout the country, from elementary school through college, had their students watch the inauguration - much of it online. For Jackson’s memorial service, it was something completely unexpected and more of a somber event."
It was also an event taking place during midsummer, when folks tend to minimize the time they spend peering at a TV or a computer screen.
Generally speaking, the video traffic figures confirmed White's one-two prediction, although there were some extra twists. Msnbc.com, for example, delivered a little more than 3 million live streams of the service (compared with more than 9 million live streams reported for Inauguration Day). However, msnbc.com said the total streams (including on-demand video) added up to about 19 million - which surpassed the 18.2 million reported for Jan. 20.
The NewTeeVee blog said CNN registered 9.7 million live streams (vs. 25 million live streams claimed for Inauguration Day). Yahoo said Tuesday's 5 million total streams outdid Inauguration Day's 1.8 million, making the memorial service the "most streamed" event in the company's history.
How did you experience (or not experience) today's events? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Last updated 1 p.m. ET / 10 a.m. PT July 9. Yahoo's figures for Tuesday's streaming were initially characterized as coming in second to Inauguration Day, but that order was based on simultaneous streams. The order was reversed for total streams, and as a result the characterization has been changed. Msnbc.com's traffic figures also were updated as more data became available.
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