• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, May 2, 2011

Anything that gets my night owl teenage daughter up at 4 am has got to be an event. In fact, taking my own friends as a focus group I expect a massive number of moms and their daughters set the alarm for early morning to catch the Royal Wedding of Kate and William on Friday. Many of them likely were parallel streaming Web coverage, no doubt. Nielsen reports that 23 million people watched the event on TV across 11 different networks.

For online, the early tallies are in, and while most sources do not report World Cup-size streaming activity, the numbers were impressive. Yahoo!, which wasn't even the official video streamer for the Wedding, reported its video viewing was a new record, up 21% from previous holder, the Michael Jackson funeral.

Akamai, a provider for many of the major media sites, says that the 1.6 million simultaneous streams it served early Friday just edged out the previous World Cup final. They told hometown paper Boston Herald that the activity was especially surprising considering that it took place in the wee hours of the morning in the US and was on a non-workday in the UK. Akamai said this was the sixth highest level of video activity it had seen on the Web.

CNN said its global video usage of both live streams and VOD throughout the day hit 7.7 million for Friday, with 699,000 of them live video streams. Interestingly, video views to the CNN mobile sites (in the U.S.) were up 739% over the Friday average.

ABCNews.com says it had the highest traffic since the Presidential elections of 2008. E! Online reported a record high as well.

Overall, there were few reports of outages or slowdown throughout the Web. But the YouTube RoyalChannel did suffer some burps.

The special page on YouTube had the live feed as well as tweets coming from the Prince's residence, Clarence House. Performance monitor AlertSite says that while YouTube itself remained 100% available through the wedding, the royal channel slowed down noticeably and had only 74% availability. As of Sunday May 1, the page reports 18.3 million upload views.

Of course, events like this aren't really any fun until the strangeness sets in. there were numerous user uploads to CNN's iReport, including a man who showed off a commemorative portrait he made of the royal couple from 137 toothpicks and glue.

And if you want a really unexpected take on the wedding, try Al Jazeera. David Frost, who hosts a regular chat show on the network, is vying for the strange interviewer throne, recently vacated by Larry King. He asks one guest what the late Queen Mother's advice to the young couple would have been. Channeling dead royals, tonight on Frost Over the World.