YouTube-Streamed U2 Concert Attracts 10 Million Streams From 188 Nations

The live U2 streamed concert over YouTube happened earlier in the week, and the Internet is still alive. Barely, maybe, but it's still humming along. In what's being described as the largest concert to ever be streamed over the 'Net, U2's 360 Tour stop at California's Rose Bowl was beamed out live over the Google-owned media streaming site, and now that the numbers are in, we're even more impressed.

We tuned in for the first 80% of the show, and outside of a few blips and bloops here and there, the show was as smooth as butter on a standard cable broadband connection. Frankly, we were amazed at what we saw. The quality was top notch for being such a big attraction, and U2 has now confirmed exactly how many people tuned in.


The Sunday night show, which began around midnight Eastern Time, showed the world's biggest band in front of 97,000 in-house fans. All told, over ten million streams were connected in 188 countries. Just in case you weren't aware, that's a lot of simultaneous connections, and that's an awful lot of bandwidth. We're hearing that around 700,000 connections were attached at the same time during the show's peak, and considering just how well the site held up under the pressure, we'd love to see more concerts streamed in this manner. Particularly given the sky-high ticket/parking rates these days.