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Tuesday, April 26, 2011

The Royal Wedding and the Internet Crash - Will the royal wedding disrupt the Internet?


As the impending Royal Wedding between Prince William and the bride-to-be Kate Middleton to be taking place on April 29, 2011 comes closer, the Internet and World Wide Web is witnessing a massive inflow of information, rumors and pictures about the new English Royal Couple.


This has compelled blogs like GigaOm to share their concern here whether the Royal Wedding will break the Internet or not. The post is surely based on creating some F-U-D, that is, fear, uncertainty and doubt around one of the most hottest entertaining topics online. GigaOm shares that that Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s wedding was watched by 750 million people in 1981 on television in 74 countries.

It was the most viewed wedding according to Guinness World Records. The current Royal Wedding ceremony might beat that record as the British Cultural Secretary Jeremy Hunt anticipates two billion people watching it thus a storm of streaming could bring down networks and sites around the world. I would doubt that because the foot ball world cup was also the most streamed event across the world last year!

The British royal family's official YouTube channel here will be hosting a live stream of the BBC TV feed covering the royal wedding ceremony scheduled to begin At 9 a.m. GMT/1 a.m. PDT and the invitation is already out through the following video:


Times of India reported here that there is a mention about the Royal Couple every ten seconds on the Internet. The Times reports that a new study based on the data compiled by an Internet Marketing Agency called Greenlight Marketing Limited identified here that an average of 9000 posts a day on the subject during the last week has been contributing to the flurry of internet "noise" about the impending nuptials.

More than a 700 percent rise in the mention of the royal wedding has been witnessed compared to March. Greenlight reports that there has been a total of 158,000 posts online about the the royal wedding since March until now and that is a 38 percent  ranging to 60,964 in the last seven days. The popular topics audiences are viewing include but are not limited to keywords like cake, wedding dress, gifts, guest list, hair and make-up, rings and the wedding party. These topics generated over 15,739 during the week while the topics about dress, guest list and gifts are in the top three bracket.

The following infographic by Greenlight shows the search trends of the royal wedding:

Just to give an example of the royal wedding flurry on the Internet, the following video uploaded by T-Mobile celebrating the Royal Wedding is an example of how much excited the global Internet audience feels. As of April 26, 2011, the video has been viewed/downloaded over 11,729,671 times already:


It is agreeable that the global audience's interest and fantasy to witness a real royal wedding even if its of a couple of the British Royal Family is enormous and the Internet and Web might face certain hick-ups as more and more people follow the news till the live coverage. However, the resilience and stability of the Internet does ensure that when such kind of global event coverage takes place online, it can manage the pressure to a great extent but at the end of day, software and hardware is always vulnerable and so is the network to such hick-ups online. Let's hope for the best and good luck to the royal couple.

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