Not only did over 5,000 folks pack in to hear Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ keynote at Macworld San Francisco on Tuesday, his speech drew the largest number of concurrent viewers for a scheduled, live Webcast.
According to Akamai, the company that serves the live streams for Apple’s QuickTime TV, at its peak the keynote had 35,407 simultaneous viewers accessing 5.3 gigabits per second of video at broadband rates. This tops Apple’s previous personal best of 21,000 simultaneous viewers at last summer’s Macworld Expo in New York City, according to Macworld. (Broadband rates are defined as 300 kilobits per second, or those speeds general available over T1, Cable, DSL and ISDN connections.)
“Not only are we delivering more and more streams to more viewers,” Frank Casanova, Apple’s director of QuickTime Product Marketing, told Macworld. “These sessions were all at T1 performance and quality.”