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."
