(Los Angeles, CA) Webcastr.com, a new portal of Internet television programming set to launch next month, was inundated by viewers last Friday morning when it featured the new Britney Spears video, "Gimme More" prior to it's official release this week. Word of the video leak quickly spread throughout the blogosphere, eventually landing on popular celebrity gossip sites like "Pop Culture Madness" and "Pink is the New Blog", From there, interest in the video spread worldwide with people seeking a chance to view the new clip before its official release date, causing the site, which is still in beta testing, to crash before it even had a chance to officially launch.
"We were totally caught off guard by the global magnitude of the response", explains Webcastr founder Tim Devine. "We had traffic from 93 countries in a little over six hours and had to immediately get more server capacity weeks before we anticipated needing it."
While the service was being restored, Webcastr locked in additional coverage of the Spears' video from TMZ.com to satisfy the thousands of fans that were still accessing the site throughout the weekend.
A second test came yesterday, when the site was mentioned in a front page story on the Huffington Post for airing a series of videos from the John Edwards' campaign that had mysteriously disappeared from the web two years ago. This time the site was able to handle the surge in traffic generated via the popular blog. Webcastr officially launches next month.
