Who Streamed More at the Inauguration?

Written by Ryan Lawler

Tuesday, January 27. 2009 at 04:50 PM EST Post a comment

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Just when you thought the data points from last week's Inauguration Day had all trickled out, here comes Limelight Networks Inc. (Nasdaq: LLNW) with new numbers to show that it provided more streams during Barack Obama's speech than archrival Akamai Technologies Inc. (Nasdaq: AKAM).

In a new entry on the company's blog today, Limelight said it provided more than 9 million total streams of Adobe Flash and Microsoft Windows Media video at 12:15 p.m. on Tuesday, January 20. That entry comes after a previous report of 2.5 million streams served during the inauguration, which was posted shortly after the speech was given.

So why the jump in streams reported?

Limelight's entry is an attempt at providing more of an apples-to-apples comparison to the number of streams reported by Akamai shortly after the Inauguration ended. Last Tuesday, Akamai issued a press release reporting more than 7 million simultaneous streams at 12:15 p.m.

What Akamai didn't say was that not all of those streams were from the inauguration. So Limelight issued today a bigger, more comparable number.

While the numbers issued might suggest that Limelight has a bigger, stronger, more capable network, simultaneous stream numbers, by themselves, are fairly useless.

Because both providers were pushing traffic for multiple customers, all with different encoding formats, player technologies, and bit rates used, the number of streams, by itself, provides little in the way of how much traffic each company served -- or, more importantly, how well it was served.