YouTube's royal wedding watched by 72 million people in 188 countries
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to watch the royal wedding on YouTube. The video site's live stream of the nob nuptials was watched by 72 million people around the world.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to watch the royal wedding on YouTube. The video site has revealed that YouTube's live stream of the nob nuptials was watched by 72 million people in 188 different countries.
That's a whole lot of live streams for Wills and Kate -- now the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge -- although it falls short of predictions of up to 400 million online viewers.
We'd have thought most people would simply watch the wedding on telly and only turn to the Internet if they lived somewhere it couldn't be watched on TV -- like Mars, or somewhere. But in fact, the country sending the most viewers to YouTube was dear old Blighty.
The ex-colonials in the US showed they've forgiven the monarchy after that unfortunate War of Independence business, above Italy, Germany and France in the top five countries viewing the event. What does it say that the countries with the most interest in a royal wedding are all republics?
The BBC reports nearly 23 million people watched on US TV, while more than 24 million Britons watched the wedding on British telly. Over 34 million watched at least part of the ceremony on television or on iPlayer.
After the event, viewers who had missed out on Princess Beatrice's hat or wanted another look at Pippa Middleton's bottom Alexander McQueen dress watched re-broadcasts, taking the total number of streams to 101 million. When the happy couple kissed, an extra 100,000 people stopped by YouTube to coo adoringly.
Internet service provider and traffic monitor Akamai recorded close to 3 million online viewers on the happy day, smashing the previous live-streaming record set by last year's World Cup final, which was watched over the Internet on 1.6 million streams.
We'll probably never know how many people watched the wedding in total around the world, but it's likely that the widely reported figure of 2 billion viewers is hogwash. As blogger and Wired columnist Phil Gyford points out, that's 29.5 per cent of the world's population, suggesting the figure is about as likely as Prince Harry behaving himself at the reception.