A Royal Wedding Round Up: The Internet Survived
The wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, now Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, took the world by storm so much so that not even global time differences could stop people from watching the historic event from their television sets or computers. People in some parts of the world either had to wake early or stay up really late in order to witness the unfolding of this royal matrimony. But the internet managed to survive what’s been reported to be the sixth most watched event in the world, topping the 2010 World Cup games.
Of course, with such large crowd watching the event, it’s inevitable that minor glitches happen. The BBC website, for example, had its coverage interrupted because of the heavy influx of traffic. “We are experiencing some technical issues with BBC Online due to the sheer weight of traffic, which may cause the site to be slower than normal in some cases,” said a BBC spokesman.
As opposed to BBC’s performance, YouTube showed off one of the best uninterrupted live streams ever. It was a bit sluggish at times, but its home page still managed 100 percent availability, and its 1.24-sedond response time was maintained, even during the wedding.
Interestingly, the royal wedding buzz managed to kick up so unprecedentedly high that it even surpass the hubbub around the recent Japan earthquake, or the uprising in Egypt. The coverage marks the most massive simultaneous live stream with 50,000 mentions of the royal wedding throughout the 3-hour live coverage, and over 2 million within the 24-hour period. 12 out of 20 royal wedding-centric searches on Google Trends reveal “Kate Middleton wedding dress” as the 3rd most trending topic. Around 1.6 million people were reported to be watching the Royal wedding live on the internet. Below is an infographic detailing the role of social media for the event.
It also appears that tweets around the royal wedding could have bloated up more if it weren’t for the signal-blocking technology that the royal family installed during the wedding, thus, there would be no tweets or photos taken in real time. Webtrends also reveal that most activities around the royal wedding happened on Twitter, then Facebook, and lastly, blogs with 71 percent, 16.8 percent and 11.3 percent respectively. And quite surprisingly, 65 percent of the royal wedding tweets came not from the UK but the US.
People who witnessed the royal wedding weren’t only watching on their computers and television, but on sophisticated tablets and smartphones as well. There was an iPad and iPhone app for the coverage called “Kings and Queens” by david Starkey from Harper Collins Publisher Ltd. It was available for download for about $3.50.
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