The streaming of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) live from CERN on Livestation proved once more and overwhelmingly, if indeed it needed proving, the growing demand for live coverage of news events over broadband.

We pitched in to help the team at CERN in Switzerland meet that demand, as reported by David earlier, and as soon as they added a link to Livestation to the main streaming page on their site, our downloads started clocking at the amazing rate of 2/second.

At 8.30 GMT, we registered a 300% increase in requests/traffic on our system due to viewers following the “switch on” event on some of our partner channels (BBC World News, Euronews, etc). As we went live with the LHC stream a couple of hours later, traffic surged by 600% above our base level (watching during non-peak events).

Apart from being very impressed with our team ability to get the channel live in less than 2 hours, I am pretty impressed by how people are turning to the Internet more and more for their live TV needs.

It seems to me that there may be a natural tendency in people, verging on being almost a natural assumption, that live TV should be availalbe – somewhere – online.

I like the fact that we are making it easier for viewers to find what they are looking for in one place. I hope they like it too.