Internet traffic hit a record peak on Tuesday as millions of people around the world sought to watch and read about the inauguration of President Obama.

The web and TV are coming together and we saw evidence of that yesterday. The web isn’t quite ready to handle the traffic, but we are seeing video content bringing more people online and keeping them online for longer. Text will always be important on the web – the multimedia nature of it makes it more interesting than TV which is a passive medium. But video is becoming the dog to the text tail and nonprofit organizations — and businesses — need to get their online video game on.

From today’s NY Times

Internet traffic in the United States hit a record peak at the start of President Obama’s speech as people watched, read about and commented on the inauguration, according to Bill Woodcock, the research director at the Packet Clearing House, a nonprofit organization that analyzes online traffic. The figures surpassed even the high figures on the day President Obama was elected.

When people are checking for election results or the score for a big game, they tend to produce smaller bursts of traffic spread out over several hours. On Tuesday, everyone wanted to watch video, and that produced bulky streams of data traveling from media companies’ data centers out to people at work and in their homes.

Data from CNN.com captured the uniqueness of the online surge. CNN said it provided more than 21.3 million video streams over a nine-hour span up to midafternoon. That blew past the 5.3 million streams provided during all of Election Day. At its peak, CNN.com fed 1.3 million live streams simultaneously, according to Jennifer Martin, a spokeswoman for the site.

Akamai, which helps companies meet demand for their online offerings, worked with media companies like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Viacom to stream live video. It reported a record-breaking day, feeding up seven million video streams at one time.