My friend Leo Laporte made history yesterday and I was very glad to be a small part of it.

Leo’s TWIT Live streaming network provided 24-hour coverage of the iPhone launch. Leo was at the mic (other than for nature calls) the entire time. This is MUCH harder than it looks, and Leo made it look easy.

At Apple Phone Show, instead of doing our usual Friday podcast, we pooled our coverage with Leo’s coverage. The Apple Phone Show’s Andy Ihnatko  was one of many guests who called in via Skype or over EVDO modems donated by Qualcomm for the event. Also on hand to help was my pal Alex Lindsay from the Pixelcorps. Pixelcorps members in 10 cities used the EVDO modems to capture video and sound from Apple and AT&T stores around the country and pipe it into TWIT Live. These folks acted as correspondents, providing constant updates.

Since this is very new technology and being pushed to its limits. And there were many technical challenges, but mostly it worked. When something didn’t work, we resorted to Plain Old Telephone System (POTS), as well as cell phones for text messaging and IRC.

I jumped on mic with Leo for the last two and a half hours of the marathon. He looked as fresh as he did when he started.

Many new (and old) media celebrities piped in. We heard from GeekBrief’s Cali Lewis. Kevin Rose from Digg, Liana Lehua from GirlsGoneGeek.TV. Shy, retiring and demure Jason Calacanis of Mahalo chipped in as did the Woz (Steve Wozniak of Apple inventor fame.)

We had guest spots from a variety of folks. Everyone from well-known podcasters to audience members. We even had a message from Gene Roddenberry’s son Eugene. (Gene Roddenberry was the man behind Star Trek.)

Leo managed to make sure things kept rolling even though the iPhone was covered non-stop for 24 hours. Again, this is not easy. I was pretty excited by the variety of topics and opinions that were presented as was the audience.

Now let’s look at what really happened. At any given second, between 7000 and 8000 people were watching LIVE. The cumulative audience for the event was just under 300,000! These are cable TV numbers folks without the Cable TV! We constantly had about 600-700 people on chat joining in as well.

The streaming part of this was amazing. The folks at Stickam did a great job. Streaming media has come a very long way since I started delivering radio with the Internet at NetRadio in the 90s. We could never support an audience that large simultaneously.

Many of my listeners commented that it felt like the old TechTV days. I have to agree.

Leo’s been on the bleeding edge of technology media from day one. He’s always innovating and always trying to find new ways to serve his audience.

As far as I know, nothing has ever been done like this in the brief history of new media. To do 24-hour, live, streaming coverage of a single event in front of an audience of this size is a staggering achievement.

Unfortunately, my friend Leo is notoriously publicity shy. Leo’s coverage was as big as the event he was covering. But the media will never hear about it, because Leo doesn’t really believe in marketing himself the way I wish he would.

So I am doing my small part to benchmark Leo’s achievement with this post. History may not recall this particular moment in time as we move forward. But it will be an important milestone in any event.

We’ll someday move to the point where things like this are commonplace. The audiences will be larger and the technology simpler.

But to think that Leo essentially provided live TV-like coverage, switching the video cameras himself while co-producing and hosting the show, well it’s amazing and I wish I could find somebody to reward my friend for his service to the technology industry and new media as a whole. The problem is, he wouldn’t care. He’d just call me up the next day to ask my opinion on what mixer he should add to the studio and move on.