YouTube Served Up 10 Million Streams During U2 Live Concert

This past Sunday [October 25th, 2009], we reported about YouTube broadcasting a U2 concert live. The entire event was a complete success, apparently. Early reports were that hundreds of thousands of U2 fans watched the event on YouTube. On Wednesday, that number rose up to about 2.5 million streams. Fast forward to Thursday [today], and that number has climbed up to 10 million streams.

Reports are that despite the amount of streams demanded, the quality of the program was undoubtedly fantastic for online streaming with the amount of streams demanded.

So, how did YouTube pull it off?

No doubt, Google has certainly made sure that YouTube’s infrastructure meets (if not exceeds) requirements to serve up gigabytes of traffic every second. But 10 million streams is another story. Without doing the math, let’s just say that that’s a whole lot of bandwidth.

Reportedly, YouTube turned to Akamai, the Massachusetts-based content delivery network to manage the huge amount of traffic, and it certainly was a success.

The event stands as the biggest streaming event that YouTube’s ever done. Let’s look forward to many more in the future.