Royal Wedding smashes online records

The most-watched wedding of the century so far has broken online streaming records reaching the largest ever online audience for a single event.

Internet service provider and traffic monitor Akamai recorded close to 3 million simultaneous viewers on the Big Day, breaking the previous live streaming record of last year's World Cup final, which had 1.6 million concurrent live stream viewers.

That's small potatoes (King Edwards?) compared to YouTube -- the site's live streaming of the event on the Royal Channel is estimated to have attracted 400 million viewers, although official figures are yet to be released.

The rocketing interest in the coverage of Prince William and Kate Middleton's marriage saw online video-streaming companies from all over the world breaking records, and both the BBC and Yahoo websites struggled to meet demand given the abnormal traffic. 

The event did not quite become the biggest news event in Web history, however. When it came to peaks of total page views per minute, the noble nuptials actually ended up as the sixth most popular event of all time, with a peak page-views-per-minute of 5.4 million, according to Akamai.

In the week beforehand, 2.1 million tweets mentioned the event, and nine of the top 10 trending topics were related to the royal wedding.

The social buzz reached the extent that Google searches for Kate Middleton during the same week reportedly even surpassed those for online superstar Lady Gaga. Kate was undoubtedly the most discussed topic, with 131,385 mentions on Facebook, followed by her garishly attired husband, with 104,747.