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 hummingalong. In what's being described as the largest concert to ever bestreamed over the 'Net, U2's 360 Tour stop at California's Rose Bowlwas beamed out live over the Google-owned media streaming site, and nowthat the numbers are in, we're even more impressed.

We tuned in for the first 80% of the show, and outside of a few blipsand bloops here and there, the show was as smooth as butter on astandard cable broadband connection. Frankly, we were amazed at what wesaw. The quality was top notch for being such a big attraction, and U2has now confirmed exactly how many people tuned in.


The Sunday night show, which began around midnight Eastern Time, showedthe 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 caseyou weren't aware, that's a lot of simultaneous connections, and that'san awful lot of bandwidth. We're hearing that around 700,000connections were attached at the same time during the show's peak, andconsidering just how well the site held up under the pressure, we'dlove to see more concerts streamed in this manner. Particularly giventhe sky-high ticket/parking rates these days.