Yesterday, as president elect Barack Obama was being sworn in as the 44th President of the U.S., millions watched the event unfold via an online video stream. CNN.com has reported 21.3 million online video stream requests during a nine hour period and a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. Akamai, the content delivery network, claims to have handled more than 7.7 million simultaneous streams to many major media websites. These statistics surpassed the previous record highs set during Election Day 2008.

With the good comes the bad. With it had being a record day for online video news delivery, it also demonstrated problem areas of large-scale delivery of online video content. Many websites noted a traffic jam that prevented users from accessing their video streams of the event. This was due in part from the record number of simultaneous users requesting the same video stream. This showed how broadband capacity has to be increased in the United States in order to expand future online video content delivery.

MSNBC.com and FoxNews.com also reported heavy user traffic and delivered 14 million and 5 million online video stream requests during the ceremony, according to the Boston Globe.