Unsurprisingly, YouTube says the wedding was most watched in the U.K., although it doesn’t say by how much. Missed out? You can still watch the 3 hour and 37 minute affair on YouTube’s Royal Channel here.

Sandvine’s report on Royal Wedding internet use underscores several main points…

• The event was a television event: TV sucked users from their internet screens.
   
• But internet video use, for viewers not at a TV, jumped – up 26 percent over normal Fridays. “YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) remained the largest source of video when measured in absolute bandwidth.” BBC iPlayer traffic was up nearly sevenfold.
   
• Social media was also popular – Twitter and Facebook traffic saw a day peak during the ceremony itself and the balcony kiss.
   
• A more modest mobile spike – “Mobile networks experienced larger, but more compact surges, suggesting … people were being efficient with data usage, only using mobile devices for the highlights.”
   

The feared online congestion crash never happened. “Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps the largest reason why the wedding didn’t topple networks worldwide was because
it was so popular,” Sandvine says. “With so many people worldwide choosing to turn on the TV rather than turn on the computer, a glut of online activity released more than enough network capacity to accommodate the increase in video traffic associated with the wedding.”

Akamai (NSDQ: AKAM) reported that the wedding was the sixth-largest web event ever, measured in terms of page-views per minute.

Bear in mind – Royal Wedding day was a public holiday in the UK; most people were not at their work computers.

– CNN.com: Early figures from the news site indicate strong traffic online, on mobile and via social networks. On the day of the event, CNN.com had 45 million page views, up 45 percent on the last four Friday’s average viewing numbers. Video views (on-demand and live) were 7.7 million video “starts” (no note on “completes”), a 318 percent increase. 699,000 live streams within that.

On mobile, there were 5.4 million page views, an increase of 47 percent. Mobile video views in the U.S., the only country where it was available, seemed somewhat paltry — 90,400 — but that was a 739 percent increase on previous Friday averages.

And in a new metric that CNN hasn’t started to try to monetise, the broadcaster has released some stats on Twitter and other social media usage: 7,800 people commented on CNN’s Facebook pages during the event; its tweets were retweeted 2,400 times, with 8,000 mentions of the CNNTV hashtag during the wedding. CNN had 10,000 “check-ins” on its Royal Wedding coverage, with 15,000 stickers awarded through GetGlue. That generated around seven million impressions on Facebook and Twitter, CNN says.

– Yahoo still has not released overall traffic figures (a spokesperson tells us these should be out by Monday) but did provide some early numbers. “Requests per second” were at a record-high of 40,000 per second (apparently the previous record was held by another recent event, the Japan Earthquake, which saw 33,000 requests per second).

In its morning coverage, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO) sent 14 million clicks to its Royal Wedding content, with the top-two stories on the bridal dress and the balcony kiss together getting over six million clicks in that period. Women are clicking twice as much as men.

Yahoo says that its video streams had the most traffic of any live event ever on its site in the U.S., in Europe and in the APAC region. In the U.S. that record previously went to the Michael Jackson funeral, which had 21 percent less online traffic. On-demand clips are also seeing huge mileage so far.

– YouTube: Google (NSDQ: GOOG) anticipated that its video portal would rack up a whopping 400 million viewers, although the company has yet to release how many people actually watched on the day.

– Other online stats. Livestream, which partnered with CBS (NYSE: CBS), the Associated Press, the UK’s Press Association and Entertainment Tonight for coverage of the wedding, said that at its peak it had 300,000 simultaneous viewers of the wedding. PBS, which partnered with UStream, said that in all 500,000 people picked up its stream of the event, with the an average viewing time of 17 minutes.

Akamai (NSDQ: AKAM) reported a peak of 2.9 million live streams at the time of the wedding — but confusingly that includes traffic for wedding streams (it partnered with Fox News, CBS and other news outlets to transmit the event), as well as other content on its network unrelated to the royal wedding.

– Social media. Twitter dedicated special servers to the surge of traffic it was expecting for the event, although it has not released any figures on what kind of traffic it saw on the day. Meanwhile Facebook says that it had more than 10 million messages posted about the wedding on April 29.

– Printed media. A massive amount of coverage here, too, but not a complete shutout. An informal survey by The Wrap of leading newspapers across the world (as documented by Newseum) found that some 87 percent of them were featuring the wedding on their front pages. Online, some newspapers (such as The Guardian) were offering readers two different home pages: one completely taken over by the wedding, and one from an alternate universe where the wedding didn’t exist. Would be interesting to see how traffic compared between the two.

– People.com also saw record-breaking numbers of its wedding content, with 162 million page views on the big day, more than doubling its previous record (76 million views); and surpassing all views of its royal wedding coverage prior to April 29 (150 million page views).

– Live TV: Some 24.5 million people in the UK watched the wedding on TV, putting it behind the wedding of Prince Charles and Diana Spencer (28.4 million). The BBC says that 34 million people watched at least part of the broadcaster’s royal wedding coverage — that figure includes live iPlayer streams, as well as other channels such as BBC1 HD, but the BBC does not break out specific numbers for individual channels.

In the U.S. 23 million people watched the wedding live across major networks, according to Nielsen. ABC (NYSE: DIS) says that with 8.65 million viewers, it was the most-watched morning broadcast in 20 years on the network. Online, it noted that it had more than 20 million page views, with more than 3 million unique visitors.

NBC (NSDQ: CMCSA) has collated all of its different networks, and viewing across all different programs, and said that 52.3 million viewers tuned in for wedding coverage. Within that there were 18 million video streams on MSNBC.com, as well as 23 million page views for E! Online, and another 3.1 million for the mobile site. NBC’s Royal Wedding app for iPhone, iPad and Android had 200,000 downloads.

– Crashes. The BBC experienced some “technical issues” from the weight of traffic to the site, which resulted in some people being unable to stream coverage from the site.

So far, there has been no word that the same issue affected YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), which was rebroadcasting the BBC’s feed as part of its official royal channel. Some reports of other sites, such as Twitpic, also buckling under posting pressure.

– Twitter, Facebook: Social networks appeared completely dominated by Royal Wedding chatter during the event, underscoring how this has definitely become one way (or a simultaneous way) of “watching” a live event. Here’s one shot of the trending topics on Twitter, taken at 12:23 Greenwich Mean Time:

– TV on top. Even so, it looks like initial numbers — even those being gathered informally on the Internet itself — confirm that traditional TV was the most-used channel for watching the wedding. A poll on Mashable currently puts TV at 40 percent of all Royal Wedding views, with livestreams at just under 20 percent. Notably, “not at all” was just over 30 percent of all respondents. Multiple screens was six percent.

Despite the number of mobile apps that we’ve seen come out related to the wedding, it looks like mobile played a small role when it came down to the live event. In that Mashable poll, mobile viewers accounted for under two percent of all views.

– More to consume. The official Twitter account of Clarence House, the residence of the Prince of Wales, tweets that all the music from the ceremony will be available for downloading from iTunes. All the programs and other details from the event can also be downloaded from the official site.

– Royal swag? TechCrunch reports that eBay (NSDQ: EBAY) searches for Royal Wedding-related items have grown by 1,815 percent this year, with $70,000 of transactions on 3,000 items in the month of April alone.

The Guardian has a nifty real-time infographic measuring Twitter keyword frequency around the event, which I must say has gotten significantly more random as the event fades into the past.

All manner of service providers has, for weeks, been peppering our inboxes with announcements of features they hope will help them monetise, broadcast and otherwise draw audience from the biggest royal occasion in decades.

But when the main event — the actual wedding itself — actually takes place, don’t expect a blow-by-blow account: cell signals are getting blocked during the ceremony in Westminster Abbey. (Update: According to CBS (NYSE: CBS), Scotland Yard is refuting the blocked call report.)

Police confirmed to Yahoo’s wedding bloggers that cell signals will be blocked in Westminster Abbey from early Friday morning and will continue to be blocked for the duration of the ceremony. That will mean no rings while the rings get exchanged — but it will also mean to live tweets from any of the more social media-minded attendees. We’ll see if someone manages to crack through that barricade tomorrow. Twitter has been one of the most-used mediums for chatter about the wedding up to now:

Web

• A video opportunity? Every major network will be providing streaming of the event, and the portals might also come into their own here, too. But, as the happy day is a UK public holiday, most viewers will likely be in front of a TV, not a PC.
   
• Skateboarding Corgies? YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG), in its latest big live stream, gets an official nod from Buckingham Palace for its broadcast, through the official Royal Channel on the site.
   
• Does one ‘*Yahoo*’? The search portal has put in place its own Royal Channel, aggregating not only a live feed of its own, but also photos, articles, games, chat boards, localised content, and whatever else it will think might be relevant that will drive more users to the site.
   
• Traffic surge contingency? Finding a site on which to watch the royal wedding won’t be hard — more difficult might be trying to avoid it — but what might prove a challenge is finding a portal that isn’t over-congested.
   
• Same goes for mobile networks. Operators are already looking to boost capacity at pressure areas in the UK (such as the village where Kate Middleton’s family lives in Berkshire, which has become something of a pilgrimage ground for royal fans) where mobile networks are expected to see heavy use.
   

Mobile

• Apps are popular. Thirty-four percent of people have downloaded royal wedding apps, according to a MyVoucherCodes survey of 1,700 UK adults – average number of apps: two. Eighty-three percent of those apps are free, average price of the paid apps is at the low end of the range: £0.79 ($1.30). The breakdown of users: 39 percent on iPhone; 32 percent on Android; 21 percent on Blackberry; six percent on Nokia (NYSE: NOK) and two percent ‘other.’
   
• The mappy couple. Some apps are informative, if a bit stalkerish (“track the happy couple on your Android phone”, and yourself if you’re hanging out near them, using “exquisite” hand-drawn maps, promises iDo).
   
• Play along. (“celebrate the royal wedding by spotting the 50 romantic comedies hidden in our canvas!” says Say What You See; or, Blabber, the word-prediction game app for those watching TV (guessing what pundits will say).
   
• News and information. Rough Guides’ Royal walking tour for iPhones, numerous apps from broadcasters aggregating video and other coverage (such as this one, for Android and iOS, from UK news agency ITN).
   
• Papers have jumped aboard. The Times and the Mirror) have special apps for the event. These are effectively extensions of the kinds of magazine supplements the newspapers love to publish around special events.
   
• The official app. The Royal Family itself is also getting in on the act, with 3D apps of Westminster Abbey and an app using archives from the Royal Collection showcasing royal weddings past.
   
• Scan your TV: CNN will direct its mobile-touting TV viewers to its mobile website using on-air barcodes, which it hopes viewers will scan with their handset.
   

Social media

Some crossover here, with traditional outlets looking for some social media mojo, and those in social media looking for an anchor for their efforts. Photo social network Color (ah, remember them?) have done a deal with the UK newspaper The Telegraph to collect and post photos from people at the event and other points of physical convergence. These will come up as a continuous stream via the Telegraph, and on Color’s site, with the best of the lot to be published by the newspaper after the event.

• The Twoyal Twedding: “In case you haven’t seen it, the official hashtag for the Royal Wedding is #rw2011,” says @ClarenceHouse, one of the monarchy’s royal homes.
   
• Across the pond: Americans are tweeting more (40 percent) about the event than Brits (31 percent), says Trendrr (via CNN) – with traffic spanning from New Haven, CT, to Tusla, OK, and beyond.
   
• Royal gush: 46 percent of tweets are positive, 43 percent neutral, 12 percent negative, Trendrr says (via CNN) – there were 5,000 per hour last week in total.
   
• Broadcasters’ love affair with social sites continues: CNN is encouraging viewers to collect virtual stickers by “checking in”, via GetGlue, to its coverage, over which CNN will lay tweets and comments solicited via its #CNNtv hashtag, handpicked from celebrities and via Facebook Status Update. It’s also soliciting multi-media material via iReport.