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This item from Marketwatch underscores VitalStream's tremendous market opportunity.

CBS Corp. appears to be on track to set the record for the highest number of live simultaneous viewers on the Web without any major disruptions.

The media giant's unprecedented airing of the men's NCAA tournament live and free on the Web drew a peak of 268,000 simultaneous viewers Thursday.

That level of traffic would give CBS bragging rights for handling the largest audience at any one moment for a live entertainment program on the Web.

Since there were few people in CBS's virtual waiting rooms at the peak time, the network believes it can handle an even larger audience.

The numbers were so impressive that they prompted Yahoo to send out a release reminding everyone that the Internet media giant still holds the record for simultaneous viewers of a live event - in this case a news event, rather than entertainment. Yahoo's July 2005 Webcast of the Discovery Shuttle launch attracted 335,000 simultaneous users who watched the NASA ship return to space.

That surpassed Yahoo's coverage of Howard Stern's final day in terrestrial radio, which pulled in 214,000 simultaneous viewers, according to Yahoo. The Live 8 concert shown on Time Warner's AOL.com site was said to have drawn 175,000 simultaneous viewers.