Sean Spicer lies once again about inaugural viewership

During his first full official press briefing, the press asked Sean Spicer once again if he stands by his claim that Trump's inauguration was the most watched. Spicer replied with a misleading statement:

"Sure. It was the most watched inaugural. When you look at... look, uh... you look at, just in, one network alone got 16.9 million people online. Another couple of the networks, there were tens of millions of people that watched it online. Nevermind that the audiences here 31 million watched it on television. Combined it with the tens of millions of people who watched it online, on a device, it's unquestionable. I don't, I don't... and I don't see any numbers that dispute that, hen you add up attendance, viewership, total audience, out total audience in terms of tables, phones... uh... on television, I'd like to see any information that proves that otherwise."

https://youtu.be/vu1tU5_JMSE?t=25m59s

When asked if it was more watched than Ronald Reagan in 1981, Spicer responded:

"I'm pretty sure that Reagan didn't have YouTube, Facebook, or the internet, yeah, I think 41 million people watched this."

So basically Spicer claims it was the biggest inaugural ever because of internet streaming.

But according to Politico, Spicer compared apples to oranges and his claim is almost impossible to prove:

"He has a point, but it is one that is almost impossible to prove. The reason? TV ratings and online streaming metrics are not an apples-to-apples comparison, so there is no easy way to calculate exactly how many people watched the inauguration online in a way that is comparable to TV viewership data released by Nielsen."

http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-media/2017/01/trump-inauguration-streaming-audience-234056

The reason? Because many of the streams are from people who simply reloaded the page:

"Spicer cited CNN’s 17 million streams of Trump’s inauguration, which he added to the 2.6 million that watched CNN live on TV. The problem with that is that the 2.6 million figure is not the total number of people that watched CNN, it was the average number of people that watched. The 17 million streams are the total number of streams, not the average number of people watching. That 17 million figure may include people that reloaded the webpage, or that clicked in and watched for 30 seconds, or people where the inauguration started to auto-play on the CNN story they clicked through."

And guess what? Obama had more live streams on CNN:

"While CNN had 17 million streams in 2017, in 2009 it said it had more than 21 million streams, which, when combined with CNN’s higher TV viewership in 2009, would seem to undercut Spicer’s claim. CNN did peak with 2.3 million simultaneous streaming viewers, up from 1.3 million simultaneous viewers in 2009, but that may be due to the fact that live streaming technology has improved to the point where networks are simply able to handle the higher bandwidth today than they were eight years ago."

So once again Spicer is using misleading claims to back a falsehood.