What kind of Web traffic did President Obama’s inauguration generate in the U.K.? Here’s how some services—including online TV offerings—fared on the historic day. Note: Some of the outlets we approached were reticent to give actual figures for the afternoon, perhaps suggesting live news events are more naturally suited to TV.

—BBC News Editor Steve Hermann: “The number of those watching the live stream concurrently peaked at about 230,000 (just after 1700 GMT) ... totaling over two million page views. More than seven million users came to the site overall, which is high but below the numbers we recorded for the US election itself. Of those, roughly 1.5 million unique users accessed video (or audio).”

—Zattoo: UK general manager Alex Guest: “We had a huge spike in the UK starting at 4 pm on both BBC News and BBC One and across both standard and HiQ streams—multiple times what we see at this time of day normally. ITV1, Channel 4 and Five remained totally flat. We had approximately four times as many new registrations as usual. When such an event coincides with normal working hours, watching live TV online is rapidly being adopted within our culture. After the inauguration, there will likely be an inflection in the number of people who watch TV online.”  Full story on paidContentUK...

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