Memorial service a national viewing experience, in gatherings both online and in person

Jackson service a national viewing experience

NEW YORK — A giant audience formed for Michael Jackson’s memorial service, as millions gathered in public, in front of televisions and at computer screens to experience the mourning of the celebrated pop star.

Chants of “Michael! Michael!” rang out in Harlem, where about 1,000 gathered to watch the memorial service on a giant screen live from Los Angeles’ Staples Center.

A steady stream of fans — wearing Jackson T-shirts and listening to hits like “Billie Jean” — visited the singer’s boyhood home in Gary, Ind.

“I felt like I needed to pay homage to ‘the greatest,’” said 49-year-old, retired chemical operator Jackie Ford, who used to do Jackson’s moonwalk and drove to Gary from Aberdeen, Miss.

The media-saturated event was expected to rival the online audience of even President Barack Obama’s January inauguration — which similarly was a daytime event witnessed by many on their computers at work.

Aside from the wall-to-wall coverage by the TV networks and cable news channels, the memorial service was streamed online by many news outlets and Web sites, including Hulu.com, MySpace.com and The New York Times’ Web site. The Associated Press’ online video network also offered a live broadcast.

The wealth of options in how one could experience the memorial service — from cell phones to jumbo screens — reflected the new, fractured media landscape that could perhaps only be unified by a boundary-crossing superstar from an earlier era.

Calculating just how many people in total watched the ceremony — around the world and across all platforms — will take several days and even then will likely have to resort to an approximation, given the huge variety of outlets.

Alan Wurtzel, chief of research at NBC Universal, called it “the first multi-platform significant culture event.”

Several news organizations rolled out interactive features previously used for Obama’s inauguration. CNN.com, ABC, MTV and E! Online integrated their live video with chatter from Facebook.

“This has a shot to be one of the biggest lives events we’ve hoisted up,” said Kenneth “KC” Estenson, senior vice president and general manager of CNN.com.

Estenson noted, though, that live video on the Web is still in the nascent stage and can be “a dicey proposition.” A huge swell of traffic — and the heavy bandwidth of video — can cause troubles across the Web.

Some congestion across the Web was likely, but most live streams appeared to run smoothly.

CNN said the site received 9.7 million live video streams globally as of 5 p.m. EDT. That’s less than the 21.3 million streams Obama’s inauguration reaped for CNN, but more than the 5.3 million streams it had on Election Day.

Facebook said there were about 800,000 user postings on the social networking site related to the live online broadcasts of its partners.

Akamai’s Net Usage Index, which monitors global news consumption online, found that Web traffic to news sites spiked around the time of the funeral, topping at just under 4 million visitors per minute — which ranks as moderately heavy traffic.

Keynote Systems Inc., which tracks Web site performance, found that the Internet performed “within reasonable levels” Tuesday, though there were slowdowns for some news sites.

That was in contrast to the initial reaction to Jackson’s death on June 25, the news of which first spread online. The avalanche of traffic then temporarily brought Twitter, Wikipedia and AOL’s instant messaging service to a crawl.

Cinedigm Digital Cinema Network carried the memorial service on its live digital network in about three dozen movie theaters nationwide.

Somber crowds watched the broadcast in New York’s Times Square and in Harlem near the Apollo Theater, where the Jackson 5 won “Amateur Night” in 1967. Jackson impersonator Moses Harper, teary-eyed at the sight of the singer’s casket, danced Jackson’s version of “Ease on Down the Road,” from the musical “The Wiz.”

“I’m just grateful that I got to live in his time,” said Harper.

In Detroit, where his career was launched with Motown Records, hundreds of people filled into the auditorium at Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, where the memorial service was to be shown on a giant screen.

“He was somebody who really did change the style of music,” said Jonathan Contreras, a 23-year-old college student from Westland, Mich. “They call him the King of Pop. I call him the King of Music.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland dedicated a special memorial wall to Jackson while the memorial service for the King of Pop took place. A candlelight vigil was planned for Tuesday evening.

Outside the White House in Washington, Rocky Twyman, a community activist, asked tourists to sign a “book of condolences” for Jackson’s family.

“We consider him a national hero,” said Twyman. “We want people to remember the good things he did.”

About 17,500 attended the memorial service in downtown Los Angeles, including the Jackson family, numerous luminaries and 8,750 people who received two tickets from a drawing from 1.6 million. Memorial programs from the service were already being auctioned on eBay on Tuesday afternoon.

The 50-year-old singer’s death brought an outpouring of grief and remembrance from fans across the globe. To a certain extent, the real memorializing of Jackson had already taken place in spontaneous urban gatherings, endless Twitter messages, thousands of YouTube postings and countless other forms of reaction.

Since then, some have grown tired of the continual news coverage of Jackson’s death, believing it has overshadowed more important stories and that Jackson — who was tried and acquitted of sexually abusing a child in 2005 — doesn’t deserve such attention.

A Pew Research Center poll published last week found that 64 percent of those surveyed said Jackson’s death has received too much coverage. New York Rep. Peter King also released a YouTube video calling Jackson, who was acquitted of child molestation charges, a “pervert” and a “lowlife.”

While many celebrated Jackson’s life Tuesday, others shrugged off the spectacle. In Baltimore, a simulcast of Jackson’s funeral at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, drew only about 10 people. Much of the crowd went about their business checking out books without seeming to notice the screen showing the memorial service.

Associated Press writers Ben Greene in Baltimore, Jim Irwin in Detroit, M.R. Kropko in Cleveland, Jennifer Peltz in New York, Caryn Rousseau in Gary, Ind., and Nafeesa Syeed in Washington and Television Writer David Bauder in New York contributed to this report.