Live Internet Television

Digital Media Wire has published interesting numbers for live viewing of the inauguration at Ustream’s site and via iPhones:

Ustream, the provider of an interactive video broadcasting platform, announced on Tuesday that it served some 3.8 million streams today, including a live feed of the inauguration that was viewable via the company’s new iPhone application. The company said it counted 400,000 concurrent users watching inauguration events during the speech and swearing in, including “tens of thousands” on their iPhones.

And that’s just Ustream. CNN reports 21.3 Million streams, with 1.3 concurrent. How many of these millions were satisfied with their experience we can’t know.  As  I posted yesterday, there was a lot of frustration and disappointment making itself felt on Twitter by people who had interrupted streaming and problems watching online. And the Washington Post also feels it was not a success.

With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming. But live streaming failed. CNN.com kept bumping viewers into virtual waiting rooms. This happened to me in the middle of Obama’s speech. I had to keep hitting refresh, but missed half the speech. The stream on Hulu was even worse, with the video frozen and the audio coming in and out. And forget about Ustream. I couldn’t even get any audio. This seemed to be the general experience out there, based on other reports.

Amidst all this frustration, it’s encouraging to note so many were onboard with online viewing at the outset. The online-live experience will improve.

Dude, that’s billions!  I promise not to overdo it too much with Obama posts today, but I wanted to call attention to the Official Inauguration Book Project, yet another online tool that is helping people participate and connect to the events our nation is experiencing this week.

It’s staggering to watch the image-upload counter at the bottom of the page jumping by hundreds as it races toward 7B images people have uploaded. What will the number be when you read this?!

And, how will the editors of the official book be able to jury that many uploaded images to select some for inclusion alongside the professional shots taken today?

People have overwhelmed Obama’s public-service website, which connects you to very local opportunities to volunteer for nonprofits, charities, civi efforts, etc. The sign his speech calling people to action for collective wellbeing was instantly effective.

Twitter is awash this morning with folks who are very disappointed that they were foiled in their attempts to follow the inaugural proceedings live on the Internet. A few typical comments:

Fifty stuttering web streams in this office and not one working radio or television? I hate the Internet. (@robot_operator)

internet streaming — FAIL — i wish i owned a television for the first time in my life (@gustinp)

i know now why the internet is not yet a viable threat to broadcast television. (@chrisgoodrich)

Christian Science Monitor photo

I am very sorry for these tweeps because I derived a huge amount of pleasure and satisfaction watching the inauguration with my family — still shivering from Aretha’s amazing performance of My Country ’tis of Thee as well as from the new president’s incredible speech.

But I am also feeling REALLY smug since I know ivi’s going to blow through bandwidth and piracy-protection barriers and make a lot of people’s TV-Internet dreams come true.

Great interview with Clearwire CEO Ben Wolff yesterday over at GigaOm. Two things stood out as very interesting and encouraging.

First, Wolff’s recognition that there’s no competition between municipal, white-space, and commercial spectra/networks.

Both consumer and provider are served by overlapping blankets of access that make it possible for people to bring more of their lives online with reliable service and a seamless, good experience.

As with all things, choice is good.

Second, I was impressed that his emerging model for handling network congestion doesn’t include limiting the type of high-bandwidth applications that people are starting to use more frequently.

GigaOM: What about network management such as blocking some traffic or slowing it down when the network is congested?

Wolff: We will have to experiment with how were dealing with network management issues. We won’t ID specific bandwidth-hogging apps and try to restrict or limit those. What we’re going to do is manage the network on a sector-by-sector basis, so if there’s no congestion we do nothing. If it turns out we do have congestion, we’ll manage bandwidth for all users in that segment rather than by applications.

GigaOM: Can a WiMAX network really provide the amount of bandwidth necessary to offer services such as streaming video that can really clog wireless networks today?

Wolff: One of the benefits over 3G is we have much more capacity, and we designed it to have a large number of customers using a large amount of data — including consistent streaming capacity.