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Live skydive smashes YouTube records

A record-breaking 24-mile skydive by Austrian daredevil Felix Baumgartner attracted the biggest ever audience to a live event on YouTube last night.

Baumgartner reached speeds of more than 800 miles per hour as he leapt from a balloon on the edge of space and fell back to earth in 10 minutes.

A two-hour documentary called Space Dive is being produced by National Geographic Channel, the BBC and Red Bull Media House and will air in November but it’s the live-viewing figures online that are attracting most attention.

The jump was aired live on Discovery Channel in the US but the rest of the world could only watch the jump unfold online. That meant more than eight million people, more than ever before, tuned into a single online live stream, with YouTube confirming the record today.

By way of comparison, UK terrestrial ITV1  drew an average audience of 8.2 million viewers, peaking at 11.7 million, during its Sunday night primetime which included a live results show for X Factor and a new episode of period drama Downton Abbey. This was the most watched channel in the UK last night.

The jump, which takes the active simultaneous streams record from President Barrack Obama’s inauguration, caps a big week for YouTube that used last week’s Mipcom in Cannes to announce a new wave of channel launches.

The BBC/Nat Geo doc will feature footage from the dive, as well as behind-the-scenes access to four years of preparation. Gary Hunter is the executive producer for BBC and Richard J Wells for National Geographic.

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