Event

YouTube launched its first ever live streamed event yesterday (November 22, 2008). The event was from San Francisco, California. The event hosted a variety of You Tube celebrities. It includes stars such as rapper Will.i.Am and singer Katy Perry and YouTube sensations like 20-year-old Esmee Denters, who posted video of herself covering popular songs and became a star on the World Wide Web.The show was held in front of a live audience of 3000 people with millions of people worldwide to watch the first live-streamed event in YouTube’s history. You Tube also conduct this event in Tokyo, Japan but it was not streamed online.
YouTube Live in San Francisco attracted 700,000 concurrent live viewers. What does it means? Yeah! we are going to find it.

Behind the Curtain

YouTube Live is a grat idea from great Google. But there is one remaining in every one's mind, How they made it? . Serving a video to 700,000 users is not a simple task. So they used a Content Delivery Network to stream video online. Google has its own CDN for text/image contents but it cannot be used for streaming live video.
It was rumored that Google has met big three live streaming services — Mogulus, Ustream and Justin.TV — to discuss partnerships or for an acquisition. But at last they turned choosing Akamai instead of making their own CDN. Google won't confirm this,but it's very easy to detect( Check out the screenshot). However Akamai proved the strength of their CDN network by this event.

Screenshot-Digging