The Figures Are In, U2 on YouTube – Almost 10 Million Streams

Did you watch the concert last Sunday night on YouTube? I watched most of it, and I was happily surprised at the actual quality of the feed.

Unlike the Microsoft Live Earth proceedings, there was no cutting in and out, nor was the overall video quality as grainy (going full screen on my 1680 x 1050 monitor did not induce vomiting).

The audio quality was very good too, as the person in charge of the feed board had a much better ear for a good blend. I was remarking during the concert that I hope this makes it into a DVD product.

From AllThingsD a few more details about the Tube event of the year -

What happens when one of the biggest bands in the world Webcasts a live concert on the world’s biggest video site?

You get a lot of video streams. Close to 10 million, says YouTube, adding that Sunday’s live Webcast of U2’s Rose Bowl concert was the single largest event it has streamed so far.

Granted, Google’s (GOOG) video site only started streaming live events last year, and doesn’t do them very often. But this was a pretty good muscle-flexing event, and by all accounts it went pretty well–I read some gripes about the site limiting transfer speeds, but many more raves about the quality of picture and sound.

Yes, the feed was very good, and I never had a drop where I was sitting waiting for something to buffer.

That 10 million number, spread out over two-plus hours, doesn’t really tell us how many people watched the concert or how many did so concurrently. YouTube’s first attempt at live streaming, its weird “YouTube Live” concert/award show, may have attracted a peak audience of 700,000.

For some context, consider that last week’s episode of “The Mentalist” on CBS (CBS) drew 11.8 million viewers, which made it the 20th-ranked show in the U.S. But the fact that YouTube is even playing in the same league gives you a sense of the site’s reach.

And recall that YouTube boasted this month that it is now streaming more than one billion streams per day, which means that the overwhelming majority of its users were watching something other than Bono and company on Sunday.

You can see an amazingly high-quality version of the concert here, though it isn’t embeddable. But here’s a clip of a fake U2 concert from a couple of years ago.

It is amazing how much can be done in multicasting. As good as things were, I kept wondering just how much more it would take (in bandwidth) to have smooth action video. It was interesting to see that the YouTube window was showing a readout of bandwidth. Through most of the concert, it was sitting at 4.4Mb/s. I think that for many, that was the pointer to the fact that YouTube was providing enough bandwidth, and if you were having problems with the feed, it was farther down the chain.

Still, it was the best example of internet feed I have witnessed yet.

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Not quite as good as the real thing … but when you couldn’t get a ticket.