14 DAY TRIAL // With the Michael Jackson Public Memorial Service just a few hours away, it is set to become the biggest online event in history. To be held at the Staples Center in Los Angeles today at 10:00 AM PT, it will house 17,500 lucky fans but, for the rest of us, the show will also be streamed online for free by several services.
CBS will be partnering with online video streaming provider Ustream as the two companies already have a deal in place for the latter to stream content from CBS News with regular news reports as well as major events, for which the memorial clearly qualifies. The site is already streaming video live from the Staples Center and also has an integrated Facebook chat, a feature announced last month.
Hulu, one of the most popular places for premium online videos, will also be streaming the event with content coming from Fox News, one of the site's major network backers. It isn't clear at the moment whether the site will allow users outside of the US to view the content as generally Hulu is restricted to locations inside the country.
Facebook will be teaming up with CNN again, like they've done in the past, for example at Barack Obama's Inauguration Ceremony, and the stream will begin at 9:00 AM PT, one hour before the event starts. MySpace will also be broadcasting the event through MySpace TV with the help of AEG starting from 10 AM PT.
Anticipating huge interest, a drawing was set up to randomly choose 8,750 fans to receive two free tickets for the memorial and the site that handled the registrations saw huge traffic numbers immediately after becoming available, with 500 million views in just the first hour and a half. Since then 1.6 million people have registered for what is expected to be a great event with a number of celebrities and family friends speaking and also a few performances from the likes of Stevie Wonder, Mariah Carey or Lionel Ritchie. It has now been reported that Michael's body will also be displayed at the event giving fans a chance to say their goodbyes.
While services and sites around the web are bound to be better prepared for the event, some problems may still pop up as it's hard to predict just how many people will be watching. Still if there are issues they are likely to be on a much smaller scale than at the time of his death when a multitude of sites and services had spotty service or went completely down.