Live streaming of Obama's inauguration caused the Internet's top 40 sites to slow to 60% of normal speed. Wow.

WebGuild posted an excellent article today on the effect that all of the world’s live video streams had on the Internet yesterday during Obama’s inauguration. I was hoping that somebody would have the metrics for that. It appears that it was the good people over at Keynote. Predictably the total number of pages viewed was down which often happens when video minutes increase. Akamai (which owns 50% of the global CDN/video delivery market) went from 2M concurrent live streams to 7.7M. If we double that to take into account their competitors, that means that video usage went from a normal amount of say 4M concurrent live streams to approximately 15.4M concurrent streams – almost 4x higher than normal.

Does anybody still doubt that internet video is here to stay? I don’t.