CNN hoping Obama inauguration is Web's 'most watched event ever'

CNN and Facebook announced today that Web watchers could enjoy Barack Obama's inauguration interactively with a talky-chatty Web TV doohicky the two companies developed together. The application will be running at cnn.com/live and will allow Facebookers to see what their friends are saying about the proceedings. The festivities will begin at 7 a.m. Pacific time -- just when most of us out here are blearily checking Facebook to see whether we got any overnight wall posts.

CNN.com President KC Estenson told MediaWeek that despite the early start time, CNN and Facebook had high hopes. "We're building the technical infrastructure for the possibility that this may be the most watched event ever on the Internet."

It'd be nice if Estenson pointed to the current online viewership record, but he didn't, so ... I'm not quite sure what it is. A long time ago in 2007 the Live Earth concert brought in 237,000 simultaneous viewers. It would seem that a 15-month-old number like that shouldn't be hard to beat, considering the visibility of the event. It's also possible that the record was set during the 2008 Beijing Olympics (NBC's online distributor Limelight expected it to be), but NBC never gave out simultaneous-viewing numbers. We just know, for instance, that NBC.com served 13.5 million video streams in the first four days of the Olympics -- meaning an average of 3.3M streams per day, or about 140,000 an hour. 

Inexact calculations to be sure, but they offer a sense that in terms of simultaneous viewing, cracking the 1 million barrier almost certainly hasn't been done yet, and even 500,000 is probably still a milestone. 

We'll follow up with CNN after the event to see whether they've released the numbers.

-- David Sarno