In a brief press conference, the White House press secretary Sean Spicer said that Donald Trump's presidential inauguration was the most viewed in history.
While his inauguration was ranked fifth in terms of television viewership, people who tuned to the internet to watch the inauguration have broke a record. Trump's event has become one of the largest, single live news event that CDN Akamai has ever hosted.
"The presidential inauguration is the latest in a series of record-breaking live, online video streaming events that we have supported over the last year," said Bill Wheaton, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Media at Akamai.
According to Akamai, the livestreaming video of the inauguration peaked at 8.7Tbps at 12:04 ET. That was during the opening of the speech. At the inaugural oath, 7.9Tbps. This surpassed previous record at 7.5Tbps when the Election Day happened.
What this means, at its peak, 4.6 million people were watching the inauguration.
Akamai compared this record with other events such as the 2009 inauguration, which reached 1.1Tbps, and the 2011 Royal Wedding, which hit 1.3Tbps. Including more data, the 2016 Euro soccer tournament peaked at 7.3Tbps and 3.3 million concurrent viewers. The Rio women's team gymnastics final hit 4.5Tbps with 1.5 million concurrent viewers.
The record-breaking number isn't seen as a surprise. Trump's inauguration was held at midday, a time when people are most likely to watch from computers at work, or streaming through their mobile devices. Election Day live streams may have peaked in the evening, but many people were at home and watching on their TVs during this time, which could have impacted the numbers.
Other contributing factors include: mobile devices are adopted by more people and internet speed has increased in speed significantly. This has made a large shift from people watching traditional TV to watching videos online.
"More people than ever are watching video online, and it's being done across more devices at increasingly higher levels of quality," said Wheaton.
Data that passes through Akamai's network include more than 15 of the world's largest broadcasters
