I am quite surprised how poor the showing is for live coverage.

Fox news had a very delayed high quality video feed which dropped several times. CNN had a feed which went to "back soon" as soon as I joined it. Ustream had a feed which was solid up to 16,500 viewers with good quality audio and awful video until it collapsed.

Ars Technica had a "LiveCoverage" plugin thing which fell over all the time, their IRC server timed out twice. Even Engadget who are by far the best site I found failed to load several times.

Twitter stayed up, but wasn't quite what I was looking for.

I ended up with a Leo Laporte laptop/webcam stream restreamed via justin.tv with unusable video and near unusable audio. They claimed 90-150,000 viewers at times, so well done to them.

What happened to 2010, broadband, P2P, multicast, memcached, cloud scalability? How can IRC crash with too many users? People have been shunting text around for several decades.

If multimillion dollar media press companies can't do this properly what hope does everyone else have?