Barack Obama was today inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America. Coverage of the ceremony was shown live on several channels in the UK including the BBC.

During the 2 hour broadcast between 4pm and 6pm UK time we saw a significant increase in streaming traffic, particularly from iPlayer (which includes streaming coverage from the BBC website as well as the catch up TV service as they use the same technology).

This graph shows the volume of traffic peaking at 804Mbps, which, deducting the normal volume of iPlayer traffic we’d expect to see at that time of day, represents approximately 1200 of our customers watching online.

This is another event that represents the changing face of UK broadcasting. People are increasingly turning to the Internet when there are major news stories and events, particularly during working hours when they perhaps have access to the Internet but not a TV. It is now becoming normal when there’s a story like the US elections, the UK Budget or big sporting events like the Olympics for large numbers of people to watch online when just a year ago they may only have listened to the radio, read a news report or waited to see it when they get home.

Of course there are more events to come this year, Obama’s inauguration will just be the first of many big news or sporting events to capture the eyes of the online public. The 2008 US election campaigns made considerable use of the Internet and Obama has continued with YouTube videos and plenty of content on his own site which we can only expect to be added to. Plus if any of the Obama’s success is attributed to the online coverage expect to see more and more in future elections both sides of the pond.

Dave Tomlinson
Plusnet Product Team

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This entry was posted by Dave Tomlinson on Tuesday, January 20th, 2009 at 7:04 pm and is tagged with Traffic Management and is posted in the category Traffic Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.