Net Withstands Clinton Webcast

The Internet took a licking Monday, but kept on ticking. Reports from various Web sites which offered audio and video Webcasting of President Clinton's grand jury testimony indicated record traffic and demand, but no crashes.

Their reports were confirmed by Internet performance analysts at Keynote Systems.

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He suggested traffic to Webcasters' sites for the Clinton video may have been less than might have been expected, given the widespread television and radio broadcast of the testimony. "After all, looking at video on a personal computer at your desk is really an unsatisfactory experience," he said.

But that didn't stop sites including CBS.com, CNN.com and Broadcast.com from serving a record number of users with streaming media programming. CBS's Steve Jacobs said the Clinton Webcast brought the site's highest use ever for Real Media and Net Show content. He said the site weathered Monday's demand after failing the day the text-only report by independent counsel Kenneth Starr was delivered to Congress. Since then, Jacobs said, additional servers were installed and some "re-architecturing" was done to successfully prepare the site.

Broadcast.com President Mark Cuban said more than 1,000 Web users were logged onto the site an hour and 15 minutes before the Webcast began. "This has been a huge event, a seminal event," Cuban told CBS.MarketWatch.com. "It's up there with the Super Bowl."

He said that after strong growth in audience numbers in the first hour, the pace of new viewers slowed as the morning and the testimony wore on. He predicted heavy use later in the day of archived excerpts of the testimony.

"We're getting e-mails from lots of people," Cuban said. He said his network was handling Webcasting services for MSNBC, Court TV, CSPAN and CNN.

CNN's primary video Webcasting feed was being served by InterVU, which reported 18,000 simultaneous users at 11 a.m. EDT, and that between 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. EDT the video feeds were accessed more than 200,000 times. During the lunch hour on the East Coast, the CNN Web site was serving 350,000 hits a minute, topping the old record of 340,000 set Sept. 11, when Starr's text report was released.

Soon after conclusion of the testimony, MSNBC on the Interet said it saw a major spike in visitors. Earlier in the day, it was prepared to handle as many as 9,000 simultaneous users, according to spokeswoman Debby Fry Wilson. Only about half that capacity was used, she said, pointing out the video was widely available on television.

"This was a different situation from the day the Starr text report was issued, when the Internet was the only place to get it," she said. When the live video feed ended on both TV and the Net, Wilson said traffic jumped as visitors accessed archived segments of the testimony.

Written by By Frank Barnako