Hurricane Katrina: Testing Online Media To The Nth, Part II

MSNBC.com doubled its previous record for video streams while CNN.com faced its greatest challenge since converting to free video. We’ve already mentioned some of the local tv streaming by stations inside the impact zone but increased traffic wasn’t limited to those stations or the nationals. Cris Nuernberg, webmaster for WHDH in Boston (NBC), told streamingmedia.com the site had a 150-percent increase in overall Web traffic and served three times as much video on demand. But Richard Buck, VP-engineering for content delivery network Mirror Image, told the streaming trade media site that even though streaming traffic is up two-three times across all media sites, “I can’t claim that Katrina’s been a particularly big business event for us. It’s a huge political and personal event for many, but it’s not shaking the Internet the way the tsunami did or even the way a nasty virus does.”
Streaming ad traffic didn’t grow at the same pace held back by lack of inventory to match page views in some cases and by decisions not to try to make money off of the disaster by serving more ads. Plus, local stations are still challenged by seeling for the web.
CNN’s David Payne raises a particularly good point about the impact of the event on streaming video beyond the immediate traffic boosts: “This is clearly a spike that will hopefully expose more people to the ease with which they can get video on the Web. Getting people to sample it has been one of the challenges in getting more video streaming.”

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