Lohan Sentencing Sets Streaming Record on TMZ.com

More than two million people watched live feed of starlet's day in court

By Paige Albiniak -- Broadcasting & Cable, 7/7/2010 8:57:36 PM

Nearly 2.3 million people tuned in to TMZ.com's live stream of Lindsay Lohan's day in court on Tuesday, July 6, in which Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Marsha Revel sentenced the troubled starlet to 90 days in jail and 90 days at an in-patient rehab program.

That's by far the largest number of live streams ever delivered by TMZ.com. Prior to this, the site's best days were during a previous Lohan hearing on May 24, in which 845,000 people streamed video on the site, and on June 25, 2009, when Michael Jackson died.

"The interesting thing is that people are typically on the site from five to seven minutes at a time, but yesterday they were on the site for 16.3 minutes," said TMZ Executive Producer Harvey Levin. "People could literally not take their eyes off this. It was one of the most compelling court hearings I've ever seen."

TMZ.com offered a live stream of Lohan's hearing, which ended with her in tears. The stream came from the in-court pool, which was the one feed allowed by Judge Revel. TMZ.com featured the stream in a frame on the Web site, while surrounding it with posts, polls and photos. A poll that the site posted on Tuesday afternoon quickly had 100,000 responses. That had ballooned to nearly 800,000 by this afternoon.

"It's all part of the TMZ experience," said Levin. "We're not a site that only has videos or only has photos or only has text -- we have all of it. The site is an Internet production. Over time, we've figured a lot of it out. Yesterday was a complicated one and the whole team here did really well."