Akamai figures show that the inauguration of President Donald Trump broke all live video streaming records in terms of the rate of data transmission in Terabytes per second (tbps).

Largest Single Live News Event

The figures from Akamai show that prior to Trump’s inauguration, the largest live streaming event was U.S. Election Day (evening) back on 8th November 2016 when 7.5 tbps was achieved. Trump’s inauguration ‘trumped’ that figure with a high of 8.7 tbps during the opening of his speech.

Context?

To put these figures in some kind of context, other figures from U.S. content delivery network (CDN) and cloud services provider Akamai show that the UK 2011 Royal Wedding only managed 1.3 tbps. It is accepted however that real comparisons over longer periods of time are difficult due to rapid advances in HD video streaming, which now requires higher bitrates and has more viewers.

Better comparisons could therefore be more recent ones such as the 7.3 tbps and 3.3 million concurrent viewers for the 2016 Euro soccer tournament final which is clearly much closer to the figures achieved during the inauguration.

Mitigating Factors

In attempting to explain how Trump’s inauguration broke all previous live streaming records some commentators have also cited possible mitigating factors such as the fact that:

• It was a mid-day event so many people may have been able to watch from computers at work, or they were live streaming the news via mobile devices.
• There are now more mobile devices in use, and increased broadband speeds and more mobile broadband developments since many of the pre-2010 big-hitting live video streaming event records were set.
• Numbers of video sites and services where people can watch big events are now at their most prevalent.
• There has been a trend for some time now which sees people shifting away from traditional TV viewing to spend more of their time online.
• This was an internationally newsworthy event given what some would consider to be some unprecedented circumstances and publicity leading up to it.

What Does This Mean For Your Businesses?

For businesses seeking to host events, one important publicity and participation avenue to seriously consider may be now be live video streaming. Figures show that more people than ever are now watching video online, it’s being done across more devices, and at increasingly higher levels of quality, and this could represent an important channel for business communications, particularly as more services become available and costs fall.