Yesterday fans said goodbye to the King of Pop at a memorial service in Los Angeles. Millions more joined online to pay their respects to Michael Jackson during one of largest events ever to be streamed live.

Traffic peaked at 1 p.m. (EST) as nearly 4 million viewers per minute logged onto the live stream. An average of over 3.3 million viewers per minute was spread out across multiple outlets.

The memorial service was broadcasted live by over a dozen media outlets as well as social networking sites MySpace and Bebo. This is likely the only reason that we didn’t see pronounced outages as when the news of his passing first broke.

Many sites struggled with load times as they were mobbed with visitors during the live memorial coverage. E!Online’s Web page peaked at taking over 20 seconds to load yesterday afternoon.

E!Online certainly wasn’t the only site lagging from the flood of viewers. Load times across the sites spanned from 6.5 to 18.5 seconds, which is twice the usual range.

While the sites generally managed to load albeit slowly, the live stream didn’t always deliver smooth video. many users reported repeated jumping or re-buffering the stream often through the event.

Non-traditional outlets were also bustling with news about the live event. During the memorial, mentions of Michael Jackson peaked at over five percent of posts to microblogging site Twitter.

Over a million users also talked about the event on Facebook. The social networking site has also seen over 800,000 virtual Michael Jackson gloves given away as gifts on the service.

Michael Jackson’s hugely popular memorial service proves that the King of Pop still captures our imagination and that he can still draw a crowd. Sadly the streaming event may be the last time Jackson fans ever draw together in such force to celebrate his art and his life.

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Entry was posted on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 at 10:21 am under Media players, Music, Online video.

Read more entries by Dave Jeyes.
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