Not only was this past Saturday Night Live’s broadcast a big hit on television, with its biggest season premiere audience since 2001, it has created the most popular online video clip ever published by NBC, a network spokesperson has told Beet.TV.  The opening Sarah Palin/Hilary Clinton skit performed by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler has been streamed 5 million times.

While we expect that much of the video consumption has taken place at various NBC sites, we also know that many views were streamed on sites which used the embed file.  The Huffington Post has had 1.3 million streams, according to the number of views published on the site.

The video even appears on ABC News.

Sharing of video files is relatively new to networks and NBC was first.  We first broke the news of NBC providing sharable video in January.

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer