World Cup 2014 probably beats July 20, 1969 as far as pure viewership numbers go

Edit: 600 million watched the moon landing [1], 3.2 billion watched the World Cup [2]

[1]: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/5852237/Apollo... [2]: http://www.fifa.com/worldcup/news/y=2015/m=12/news=2014-fifa...

Amazing to me that 3.2 billion people could be watching the same thing at once while I have no awareness at all that it's happening.

Let me rephrase it: amazingly there is (at least) 3.2 billion people having no awareness of you ;)

After your links id ask another way: how many FB ers are on at the same time?

1.16 billion landline phones in 2013 per Wikipedia (CIA world factbook reported 1.26b in 2003; either is likely a roughly good peak global number, a solid mix between high globalization development (eg China & India had started to get large enough economically to install plenty of landlines) and pre high-level cellphone dominance in the developing world):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landline