Obama's speech watched online 1.3 million times and counting...

The Jed Report's keeping track of Barack Obama's "A More Perfect Union" viewership on Youtube and doing a good job of crunching the numbers and comparing the math.

As of 4pm EST, I counted more than 1.23 million views on just one version of the speech posted by the Obama campaign. There are another 60,000+ views on a second version, and an additional 1100 or so if you add up the views on the speech broken down into 5 separate parts.

Obama's the consummate Youtube candidate. When was the last time a political speech - and a 37 minute speech at that - generated so much traffic online? We take for granted how online video's evolved in the past 5 years, but I remember when watching anything online meant suffering through a choppy slideshow - a virtual buffering bonanza! Now you can expect to catch anything you missed on TV online in absolutely comparable quality. And - if you want - you can watch it on your own time without the context of someone else's punditry.

How refreshing.

I'm not foolish enough to expect or suggest online video's going to put TV out of business, but if Youtube (and its competitors) didn't exist and you weren't in a position to catch Obama's speech live, the best you'd be able to get back in the day would have been clips on the news smothered in analysis or, simply, a written transcript. Obama's words are inspirational, but his delivery makes them powerful.

I'm working on trying to dig up some numbers on how many people tuned in for the speech live yesterday. But in the interim, I'd feel comfortable assuming the online traffic has certainly matched - if not surpassed - that stat.

Some politicians have learned the hard way how Youtube can take down a candidate. This election cycle's going to teach them how integral online video can be in lifting one up.

UPDATE: TVNewser's got the numbers:

Yesterday afternoon, huge numbers turned out to watch Obama's speech on race relations, with the 11amET hour garnering more than four million Total Viewers between FNC, CNN and MSNBC combined. FNC won with 2,061,000 viewers, compared to 1,291,000 for CNN and 978,000 for MSNBC (which took the average from 10:53-11:31amET).

These are the kinds of numbers you see when there's breaking news...not normal dayside cable news numbers.