Royal Wedding Breaks Internet Records

Some people say the Royal Wedding was over the top, just too much, but apparently somebody was watching, listening or reading.

The Royal Wedding was watched by an estimated two billion people around the world. The live streaming of the Royal Wedding had 1.6 million concurrent video views, making it the biggest event to be watched on the web, exceeding last summer's World Cup, according to Akamai, which handles 20% of the world’s web traffic. The company said page views peaked at 5.4 million a minute early Friday morning for 100 news portals that it serves, a high number considering most North Americans were asleep at the time. The wedding, streamed by YouTube and other sites, also surpassed other major video events, like Michael Jackson's funeral and the inauguration of President Obama, Akamai said. Prince William and Kate Middleton's wedding set an all-time record traffic for a live video event on Yahoo, eclipsing the previous record, held by Michael Jackson's funeral, by 21%, Yahoo said. And Facebook was buzzing with "the royal wedding" "Princess Diana" "Kate's dress" and "God save the queen" all trending on the social networking site. Worldwide, more than 6.8 million people commented on the royal wedding through public status updates on Facebook in the past 24 hours, and more than 9.4 million comments through status updates in the past week, said a spokeswoman for Facebook. Twitter users were obsessed with the British Monarchy early Friday. Every Twitter trending topic in the USA was wedding-related, as were the network's worldwide topics.  One big discussion was about the similarities between Catherine Middleton's wedding dress and the dress worn by Grace Kelly when the actress married the Prince of Monaco in 1956.

Royal Wedding Facts!

• There were 1,900 guests invited to the wedding, with 1000 of them being friends, 50 being part of the Royal family, and the rest coming from troops and other dignitaries from around the world.

• The wedding lasted 1 hour, 10 minutes. Most of it was music, while the nuptials themselves were relatively short.

• Perhaps the biggest talk about the wedding were the hats, nearly all custom-made and pinned to the back, side and front of the faces of the ladies in attendance.

• Elton John was the first to show up in what Englanders call “morning wear,” a duct-tale dark jacket and grey pants. While the wedding took place at 11:10 a.m. local time, there was a lot of talk about whether morning wear should have been worn.

• Ironically, while several Prime Ministers were in attendance, Tony Blair was not invited and Margaret Thatcher was too ill to attend.

• Prince William was dressed in his best military uniform as a colonel, while Kate Middleton wore a beautiful gown with a train as long as the car that brought her to the ceremony.

• Kate Middleton’s wedding bouquet was placed on the grave of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey after the service, continuing a tradition started by Queen Elizabeth, the late Queen mother, and observed by other royal brides, including Prince William’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales.

• The bells of Westminster Abbey rang for three hours after the wedding. The ringers performed 5,000 changes for the first time since 2007.

• Brits took 327 million photographs of the Royal Wedding.

• 150,000 souvenir programs were sold by 80 military cadets and 60 explorer Scouts along the processional route.

• There were 600,000 who turned their kettles on after the couple kissed on the balcony of Buckingham Palace.

• More than 500 yards of red carpet were rolled out at Heathrow Airport arrival halls to give passengers a welcome fit for a future king and queen. Thousands of cups of White Earl Grey tea were given out free of charges.

[Via:  Akamai/Prep Nation]