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Why the Olympics Didn't Melt the Internet
perlow tips his blog entry over at ZDNet on why the Internet didn't melt when millions of users streamed 480i video for a week. The short answer is Limelight Networks of Tempe, Arizona. "[W]hy the Internet didn't 'melt' is quite simple — [Limelight is] completely 'off the cloud.' In other words, unlike Akamai and similar content caching providers, their system isn't deployed over the public Internet... Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide... so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP's main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP's internal network. In most cases, you're never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video."
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Fuck. I haven't watched the Olympics at all because I didn't have access to a tv (or a tivo). But for a change, the networks got their asses in order and actually put decent streaming video up? Now you tell me!
If the general cloud does not also support high-bandwidth content viewing, the pipe providers (cable cos) will grab our throats and shake us down for money.
This trend ought to be resisted, by net neutrality legislation or just more peer to peer innovation.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
I'm on a bandwidth cap you insensitive clo(u)d!
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Wow kudo's to the people who created limelight
I like the irony that all the MS proprietary media is being hosted (in part) by F/OSS.
I kind of wish the internet HAD melted. Not only would that have made a cool youtube video, but I waste too much time on the internet.
Come to think of it, I wouldn't have been able to view the youtube video then.
Also come to think of it, I'm wasting time on the internet right now.
I wanted to ask, does it run Linux, but the answer is also usually: yes
New things are always on the horizon
Because of the fractal shape of IP traffic, until some time ago, the only solution was to over dimension the trunk capacity, now, a lot of new techniques where developed to properly dimension and forward data packets.
We may have a lot of data, but we have also more efficient ways to deliver it.
Math is beautiful... e^(pi*i)+1=0
...for the same guys who caused a global outage of Eve Online for several days around June 20th. Maybe they learned from past mistakes?
Sounds like a special prioritized link probably paid for by the man.
Other than watercooler chat about "that swimmer kid", this has to be the least watched Olympics ever. China got the big FAIL on this one.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
NBC provided streaming video for only a small proportion of Internet-connected computers: Those running more expensive versions of Vista -- what proportion of all the desktop computers connected to the Internet is this?
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
... resolves them as a "hostile" IP range. How interesting and (Alanis) ironic; someone that PGLabs views as "hostile" managed to distribute a high content of data seamlessly over the internet.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Also, Vista installs are heavily weighted towards people who have bought a prebuilt retail computer for home use in the last few months. I don't think these are going to be the same people who are inclined to watch something on their computer instead of the television. At the very least, it cut out all the office workers running 2000/XP who would have wanted an Olympic stream running in the background during the day instead of their normal music.
I thought it was because nobody actually cares enough to watch.
Ummm...I run XP and had no problems at all.
"cloud" in reference to the internet he will he recieve a digital kick in the balls.
Fuck "clouds" and "Web2.0".
(But fuck clouds more)
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Maybe nobody was watching:
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld has a great rundown of the numbers behind this weekend's Olympic coverage. The highest day of coverage was on August 10th and it saw about 3.42 million video streams with 66.7 million page views and an average time spent on the site of 15 minutes. Pretty good numbers but as the BTL piece notes, that's only about 2% of a typical YouTube day. So it didn't exactly take the world by storm.
reference
> Those running more expensive versions of Vista...
-and not using their soundcard simultaneously (network slowdown!)
-and not having problem with Windows Activation...
-and not living in China (where only 244 copies of Vista were purchased)
For sure that's a web server log that won't take time to analyze in Splunk!
lucm, indeed.
The Olympics aren't over yet. Just because Phelps won 8 medals in swimming doesn't mean there are no games left to be played. Several team sports (volleyball and basketball come to mind) haven't even reached their finals yet.
Wait for the medal ceremonies for the big team events, and the closing ceremonies, before you start talking about the Olympics in past tense.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Let me get this straight. Olympics content is getting special treatment due to commercial deals between the Olympics Committee, Limelight Networks, and a bunch of ISPs?
How does this bode for Net Neutrality?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Because the tubes are made of copper which is quite heat conductive.
NBCOlympics.com doesn't support linux for their videos. That's why the internet didn't melt: linux users can't watch.
no, I don't have a sig
I still don't know why web sites "support" video on specific browser/OS combinations -- why not just show us the format options and leave it up to us to deal with it?
LimeLight runs quite a lot of Linux internally.
I work for an ISP in Australia, we and a number of other local ISPs have local Akamai clusters. I haven't RTFA, mainly because if the summary isn't right, then the article probably isn't right either. It is mutually beneficial for content providers and ISPs to host content locally. For the content provider, they have more content distribution points, which is a selling point to use with their customers. For the ISP, it shifts typically fairly large amounts and "types" of traffic off of their Internet transit links, saving them money.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Because our esteemed broadcaster, Channel 7, decided that it wouldn't stream anything of note at all online live.... at all.
Rather than, oh, I don't know, streaming what was being shown on tv onto the web (with ads and all, hence just the damn same revenue possibility, only with more viewers), they decided to occasionally stream some match that no-one was actually interested in at all, while they showed the 'good stuff' on tv. Which sucked, because in Australia most of the good stuff is happening while we're at work.
Except, well, channel seven's coverage has been ABYSMAL.
They:
* Spend half their time showing recaps and highlights of stuff that's already happened instead of showing things that are ACTUALLY ON RIGHT NOW
* Spend a sizeable chunk of their time broadcasting Australian Rules Football matches instead of the Olympics! For god sakes! I'm sure the footy fans can live without a bloody live football match during the Olympics... show the games when the Olympics are not happening RIGHT NOW!
* Spend a huge amount of time advertising all the shows we don't want to watch on their channel that will be on after the olympics, including one horrendously insulting one where they show some Olympic gold moment, then a bit from one of their shows, then an olympic moment, then one of their shows, all the while with soaring music and a voice over being overly earnest. Trying to suggest that they are reaching for gold, and doing their personal best and trying to compare themselves to Olympic athelets when showing Australia's next Top Model is, frankly disgusting.
* Then when they do show anything live, they seem to like showing heats and almost entire matches of deciding games of hockey or the like rather than showing finals of things that are happening RIGHT NOW.
Urgh, the coverage of the games in Australia this year has been downright pathetic, and I hope Channel 7 gets a downturn rather than an upturn in their ratings to punish them for treating them with the utter contempt they have.
NBC provided streaming video for only a small proportion of Internet-connected computers: Those running more expensive versions of Vista -- what proportion of all the desktop computers connected to the Internet is this?
This isn't the first time I've seen "Vista-only" referenced in this thread. Are we talking about streaming via a mechanism other than nbcolympics.com?
Proud member of the American Non Sequitur Society. We might not make much sense, but boy do we love pizza!
The summary seems like its been taken straight out of Limelight's PR release.....
Is the long answer the fact that the internet is clogged with more bandwidth usage every second from piracy than the total streamed bandwidth of the olympics from start to end? Yeah nobody cares.
Most people can watch the Olympics on their TV. A lot of people are not interested in the Olympics.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
The Olympics, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
as far as the cbc goes, they don't: http://stats.cbc.ca/olympics_medals.asp?sort=gold
This article has sheds some insight about the visitors that were left out.
The website said that it was Vista only, on the main page when I checked, even if the stream worked fine on every platform, a lot of people would have seen that and not bothered going any further
Multicast was in trouble before.
Now it has opposition with money.
The proprietary and expensive solution wins again. :-(
Not sure how big you have to be, but if you are of sufficient size, Akamai will approach you. They did to the university where I work. Their deal was simple: They cover all the costs, you put their computers in your datacentre. Basically the provide a number of cache engine computers and a switch to connect them to. You then mess with your routing so that traffic prefers those over their central site.
It's win-win. It costs you nothing other than some staff time, reduces your bandwidth usage (we knocked off an average of like 5mbps) and increases the speeds your users see. They of course also get the benefit of reduced bandwidth usage.
I'm sure they don't do it for every tiny ISP out there, but you you are of reasonable size (may be if you have your own ASN), expect Akamai to take notice and come offering cache engines.
...just set up caching and some dedicated links to keep the traffic off of the "main backbone" links. That just sounds like someone actually hired a halfway decent network engineer.
If you want to distribute a lot of high-bandwidth content, then you need a lot of bandwidth.
Yawn.
1. Olympics are already broadcasted almost 24/7 on TV.
2. Few people besides geeks have "real" internet media centers that allow streaming to their TVs, which are usually larger than their computer monitors (again, unless they're hopeless geeks).
3. Geeks MIGHT have a certain spot interest for martial arts or similar sports, but generally, I doubt that watching people sweat and moan is high on their priority. If at all, they get their dose of sweat-and-moan from other sources. Through the internet, granted, but I doubt there's anything olympic about it.
In short, the only ones that would probably use net streams rather than TV programs are also the ones that aren't interested in the content provided.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Netcraft confirms it.
Neither could most Macintosh users. Silverlight 2 only supports intel-based Macs. It won't run on any of the 3 Macs or 2 PCs I have at home.
I think you're referring to the Media Center content from TVTonic. This article is about the Silverlight streaming video on nbcolympics.com, which is viewable on any OS that Silverlight 2 is supported on (Win2k+, Mac OS 10.4.8+, and eventually Linux via Moonlight).
Prime relays 7 to regional areas. They have a few digital tv channels, all showing the same content. If ever there was a use for multiple channels or even multiple "views", this'd be it.
Have one channel show highlights as per analog tv, but allow other channels to stick with e.g. soccer, hockey, beach volleyball, whatever's on track/field.. Some people find only the team sports interesting, and the various races kind-of like watching progress bars. Keep the additional views going while putting the AFL on the main channel to satisfy that commitment.
So many opportunities left dangling.
-- All your bass are below two Hz
((Mac OS) - (All PowerPC Macs)) = (WTF?)
Win a signed Stephen Carpenter ESP Guitar from the Deftones: http://def-tag.com/?r=0008781
The internet didn't melt because the olympics just aren't that important or interesting.
In reverse.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Win2K is not supported. Neither are PowerPC-based Macs (the majority of the Macintosh installed base).
And yet, if i use the little bit of bandwidth they are so kind in giving me i get throttled.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think on the sad day that Moonlight for Linux is feature complete enough to watch the 2008 Beijing Olympics, that content will no longer be available. It will have vanished into the DRM vaults of the license holders and dribble out as expensively licensed clips and stills. Although copyrights are granted "for a limited time" this content will never become a part of the commons. By 2012 we'll know as much these games as we know about the 65th Olympiad in 520BCE. A shame, too, because if the content were made public after a few weeks it would immensely increase interest in the games, thereby exponentially increasing the value of live coverage. Instead MSNBC and the IOC will suffocate their golden goose rather than let the world see its eggs.
So, meh. Some guys went to some stinky chinese city and did some stuff I'll never see. When they were done they had created nothing durable nor useful. They had learned nothing. For all I care they might as well have been playing competitive Nintendo Wii. Along the way a great deal of money had been passed around, most of it advertising to promote "brand awareness" instead of anything concrete. The olympics have become a "so, what?" thing for me.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1. Timezones: The majority of content was encoded outside of the timezone for North America where the traffic was targeted so there was a huge opportunity to store and forward the content, in this case on limelight although it could have been handled by any of the major CDNs such as Akamai or Highwinds
2. I think there was a lot of last second optimizations done at the ISPs to make sure that fingers didn't point at them.
the original article was really speaking to the live streams which cannot be cached beyond a few seconds. Lets pull up the statistics.
http://nbcumv.com/release_detail.nbc/sports-20080814000000-olympicsontrackto.html
22 million streams served, 4 million of which were live streams, and additional 3 million stream served via the mobile platform and other VOD outlets.
Its going to break a lot of records. But i think that the original article and the OP here missed the point totally. If an event of this magnitude can go off with hardly a hitch, then why is it exactly that we need (the ISPs need) traffic shaping, bandwidth caps, and throttling? The ISPs among others have been saying for years that the internet is going to melt under the load of video, and using it as an excuse to add these technologies. The article on ZDnet asks the question.. is it really and we will find out in a few days (article was prior to the olympics). The real question remains that if 22 million videos at an average of 20 minutes per video and an average bitrate of 700kb weren't enough (3.5Million hours of content) in ADDITION to whatever people are doing everyday then 'why do we need traffic shaping and bandwidth management?'
Exactly,
this what I get when I try to view the Olympics on the internet.
Sorry, NBC Direct currently requires Windows XP (Service Pack 2) or Windows Media Center Edition or Windows Vista.
Last I checked, the NBC website wouldn't work under linux, anyways. I never checked back and lost interest in watching it on TV 8 years ago.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
Only millions... Everyone else must of been earning their olympic dragons on World of Warcraft.
mouse, wacom, P5 game glove, wii finger tracking, free webcam multi finger tracking, haptic modeling devices etc...
If Limelight's servers are colocated/directlinked to the ISP, does this mean that Limelight charges others for bandwidth but doesn't have to pay for bandwidth themselves? ie: server->user, doesn't go through internet so no transit costs.
The temperature generated by Olympic Fever wasn't high enough to melt the "tubes" :)
Obviously MS has an in with msNBC but the choice to force the use of a relatively uncommon 'Flash wannabe' is close to Vista marketing tactics.
If given a choice any web designer would choose Flash or just go straight for wmv/mpg/avi. The only reason to choose an unadopted distribution method is because of the arrogance of the distributor.
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Infrastructure/How-NBC-Delivers-Olympics-to-the-World/
The network is using Cisco Systems' IP video network infrastructure and video encoding software to distribute its Olympic coverage from Chinaâ"through the same virtual pipeâ"to televisions, PCs and smart phones around the world.
NBC may have all the cameras, cables, on-air talent and back-scene technicians over in Beijing for the 29th Summer Olympiad, but Cisco Systems and Omneon are the IT companies serving up all that sports video to the outside world.
By the time the Games end on Aug. 24, somewhere between 2,900 and 3,600 hours of high-definition video will have been broadcast to the television network and to millions of desktop, laptop and handheld screens.
No one can be more specific about the actual airtime, because it is simply a best guess that depends upon the length of each competition, the weather and the amount of coverage each event ultimately receives from producers.
Whatever the total airtime is, it will be more than the entire television airtime from all previous televised Olympiads (since Rome in 1960) combined.
Cisco, the world's largest IP networking hardware and software company, is providing its IP video network backbone to enable this coverage. Virtually all of the video will travel through transcontinental fiber-optic cable from mainland China to Los Angeles and New York City, where it will be edited and broadcast in a mammoth programming effort involving hundreds of producers, editors and technicians.
Cisco's WAAS (Wide Area Application Services) infrastructure enables NBC personnel in New York and Los Angeles to capture video, voice and data in Beijing and deliver it through the same virtual pipe to three kinds of screens: televisions, PCs and smart phones.
One Pipe for Video, Voice and Data
"NBC's strategy is based on an end-to-end Cisco architecture, built on top of Cisco routers and video encoding systems, as well as our WAN [wide-area network] acceleration technology, the Cisco WAAS," George Kurian, vice president and general manager of Cisco's applications delivery business unit, told me.
"This uses some key innovations: The first and most important is a single, unified network fabric built around the Cisco 12000 router. It's a 450M bps network combining real-time high-definition broadcast contribution video, voice and data from the points of creation into the studios in New York and Los Angeles."
The system transports all that video, plus TelePrompTer script content and standard data traffic, through the same fiber-optic pipes in real time.
"NBC's custom-designed application tracks and documents literally millions of assets down to the individual camera and production equipment piece, to coordinate all of the production and logistics around many events," Kurian said. "It has to run flawlessly across various intercontinental links from China to several points in North America."
Omneon and NBC came up with the custom-made application, called proxy-based workflow, to move the multigigabyte-sized files.
"This requires making low-res copies of thousands of hours of competitions that are captured in our storage system in Beijing, and using a product called ProCastâ"a video acceleration management product that proxies the images over to another media-grid storage server in New York," Matt Adams, vice president of broadcast solutions for Omneon, who previously worked for NBC, told me.
"We also have 40 'at-home' editorsâ"we call them shot-pickersâ"using a VPN to either New York or LA., who make their shot selections using the proxies. Once they decide which shots they want to make a deliverable piece with, then the system sends the proxies back to Beijing [to NBC's data center headquarters], where the high-res clips are called up from the main arrays to match the [low-res MPG4] proxies that have been selected."
Because nobody gives a damn about them this time.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
We got capped in a godawful manner by our ISP's.
That's all.
Nothing else to see here, move along now.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
to traffic problems like bittorrent. If the ISP created some sortof 'blind' caching service (bit like nntp) - then they would provide downloads to the end user faster as it's over their network (user happy) - and less packets are requested from off the ISP network (ISP happy).
To pull this analogy into the real world - the current situation is like a local library that has to order every book in from a central office. By stocking a small selection of popular books locally, your local library can easily satisfy the vasy majority of their clients - and still has the option of giving the minority access to everything they might possibly require.
In fact surely this would be a massive selling point for an ISP - surely not that hard to cache say 50% of the content your average customer downloads.
To download video requires Windows Vista Home Premium or Ultimate required because it uses Windows Media Center. To watch video requires Silverlight... which requires Windows.
Evolution is a state-sponsored, state-protected religion.
People refused to install more untrustworthy MS software.
I will not infect my system with MS SlitherLight.
Bad enough I have to use flash bloatware (its going to get worse.)
Furthermore, trying to get around windows media center requirements is not worth the time.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
You don't seem to understand. The Internet data isn't carried by cars in the trunk. It is a series of tubes. It can only go so fast in the tubes, kind of like how the water in your sink won't come out any faster. Unless you install pumps on your tubes, but then it may pump faster than you can fill it!
We are one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively. Back to you with the weather, Bob!
That's why the internet didn't melt: linux users can't watch.
Funny, but the real reason it didn't melt is because they refuse to stream video across international boundaries so most of the world cannot access it. Living in Canada my wife cannot access the NBC videos and I cannot access the BBC videos. Given the UK's fantastic performance so far this Olympics is it incredibly frustrating to have to read about it or to catch the odd event on CBC - who actually are very good at covering non-Canadian centric events but obviously don't give foreign medal wins top billing so they are hard to catch unless you watch them live.
Given that the Olympic ideal is bringing the world together perhaps they might like to extend that to web video coverage and allow all of us to watch our home countries athletes wherever we are in the world instead of going out of their way to implement technological barriers to obstruct this?
This is an old trick that we used when I worked for www.worldclassrock.com. Our audio streaming ISP did it back in 2000. It's called "edge streaming"-you establish relationships with ISPs all over and you distrubute your content directly to them via satellite. This way the content never goes out over the public Intenet-and it also minimizes the number of (packet dropping) routers it has to go through. If these guys try to patent what they did-we beat them to it by 8 years! Prior art applies here fellas!
but will it blend?
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Whatever happened to multicast? Their plan just sounds like a poor hack of multicast. NASA was multicasting their channel almost 10 years ago.
Last I heard the Olympics were still on! Still plenty of melting scope yet - the olympics don't start and stop with Phelps... There are other places other than USA...
Why? Because they buy a service off Akamai, who happen to use Linux?
in worldwide scale.....
great idea
for everything
&
anything
But, if you run linux with vmware/Windows XP, the streaming works fine. Just make sure you have enough RAM and you'll be ok. I've accessed the site from my work PC running Suse Linux 10.2, 2 GB RAM, nvidia graphics (512 mb) with vmware/XP running in a second monitor. I get the occasional hiccup, but I think that's mostly due to lack of RAM -- mostly, it runs fine.
I was interested in seeing part of the Olympics, but after the first few tries, it no longer seemed worth the hassle. I don't have Vista, and I won't install Vista or Silverlight just for the occasion, thank you very much. I also don't have TV, since the Internet usually provides more than enough entertainment, and of higher quality, too.
Too bad these idiots at marketing didn't figure out earlier how many viewers and ad revenue they would lose by making the Olympics Vista-Only.
Once again, to all the DRM-fanboys among the media providers: If it's too much trouble, then its not going to fly. I missed the Olympics, but frankly, I don't care too much.
Akamai does the exact same thing. Limelight is nothing special. The technique is the same. Any CDN worth its salt will have boxes colocated with major ISPs -- the more, the better.
Furthermore, why didn't it melt the internet ? Oh, that's easy. The Olympics streamed a couple million streams, total. This, in the grand scheme of things, is a nice bit of engineering, but nothing special. YouTube does more traffic than the olympics did in a week, in a day. I don't know what the bigger Apple keynotes got, but I'm sure it's up in those heights, too. I have a vague idea how much BitTorrent traffic there is on the net, and it dwarfs the olympic traffic by several orders of magnitude.
The Slashdot story is a marketing piece for LLNW. They have a decent product, to be sure, but they didn't do anything revolutionary here.
When I installed it, I noticed that there was DRM technology in it. Did anybody else catch that? I'm not sure if NBC is using it for the olympics, but most likely they are.
I don't have a Win2k machine to test this on, but according to the Silverlight site, Win2k supports Silverlight 2.0 with IE 6 (no Firefox support, and IE 7 isn't supported on Win2k). Silverlight 1.0 was not supported on Win2k, so that might be what you're referring to (the NBC site was using 2.0).
I imagine that PowerPC is unsupported because the Silverlight team didn't want to invest in creating the just-in-time .Net compiler for PowerPC. And while PowerPC Macs may well have a majority, they are a declining percentage of the installed base. In other words, it would have been a large investment to support a relatively small and shrinking market.
Actually, the most recent numbers I've seen is PowerPC Mac are down to about 25% of the Mac share of internet use. There may be a bunch out there, but they're being used a lot less than the Intel models, which would be no surprise. Flash can't even play 320x240 video well on the 1.33 GHz G4 I'm typing this on.
My video compression blog
was because the bulk of the world doesn't give a rats ass about crap like the Olympics. You have swimmers using suits for extra speed, China using girls who are 12-14. Who knows what DNA or steroid manipulation is being done in weightlifting, the basketball teams are (at least the USA) from the ranks of the NBA....so, who cares, it's not "sport" as much as it use to be. Plus you have China faking a 9 year old singing, fake fireworks and who knows what else.
Vista-only streams and Silverlight-only clips... no thanks. I am running Vista on one computer, but I refuse to install yet another web-content plugin just because M$ wants to dirty the waters. I understand NBC is partnered with Microsoft, but NBC's sell out to exclusive software is still astounding, considering the subject at hand.
Nobody tells me anything!
(What's olympics?)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Yes. On my Mac, I got the friendly, red "Thanks for choosing NBC Direct!" message, then the slap-in-the-face black-outlined Surgeon General's warning box "Sorry, NBC Direct currently requires Windows XP (Service Pack 2) or Windows Media Center Edition or Windows Vista.". No thanks.
The multiple channel thing isn't their fault actually, it's a restriction enforced by the government, they're not allowed to multicast SD channels until... erm... next year or something. It was something to do with the Foxtel deal I think.
But yeah, I long for the day when whoever is showing the olympics gives us multiple channels to pick what we want to watch.
*sigh*
I'm a big fan of the Olympics but I'm so sick of watching the NBC coverage. It's a crap load of bitchiness and ragging on different countries.
During the gymnastics, I hear the freaking commentator mention that the girls are not 16 but 14 for every Chinese girl that gets up there. Ok, we understand that they are underage. But give it a rest! We don't have to hear it every single time.
There's so much drama that once again, they completely missed what the Olympics is all about.
And oh yeah, what the hell is with the guy that threw his medal on the floor? Temper Tantrum?
So in conclusion, nbcolympics.com is not a worthy source of Olympic coverage.
-Kristine
I"m sorry, but this is a puff piece about Limelight and nothing more. Limelight and Akamai are both "edge servers", Akamai has been putting cache boxes into ISPs for a long time. So Limelight put stream proxies into DSL providers head ends, it's not brain surgery; it's just making a business deal.
You can increase the water flow by increasing water pressure. The reverse is true for them intarnet tubes.
At first I read it as "The short answer is Limewire blah blah". And I've though: "yes, as usual, peer-to-peer, maybe even that "destroying *IAA profits" one. Maybe sad but quite logical - people wants control themselves so if peer-to-peer is the answer ...
Then I reread the summary and realized I got it wrong: Limelight, not Limewire.
But after thinking some more I came back: Yes, maybe this "dedicated private network optimized for this kind of delivery" did save some problems with Internet connectivity by making shortcuts around the Internet itself but at the end I think another big contributors which helped to avoid "the meltdown" are:
hany
Limelight's approach has a HUGE fatal flaw. With Akamai if some bad content gets replicated they control all the servers so it's an easier fix. If Limelight's origin server pushes out bad content that gets replicated, that gets replicated to thousands of different servers all owned by thousands of different companies - you loose that control that could become a huge interest at a key time.
One thing that has stuck me for several decades is the facade of the Olys.
The participants literally dedicate all of their lives for a one-time-thing. Other people, restoring cars or collecting beanie babies the same way would be taken to psychological help, And they go to 'the big game' and compete against cheaters and various punks from across the globe.
Why, again?
This isn't 1933; there's no Hitler trying to compare his Master Race(TM) to other societies. When it's all done, what has been done? It's just so meaningless, as a whole. Jamaica beats Venezuela in bobsledding. So? Mexico beats Morroco in the 144 meter dash. So?
And since the last Olys were so under-rated, they've needed to 'chick-ify' them. Every participant 'just barely made it' with persecution in their homeland, overcoming AIDS, cannibals, or tribes of mobsters. (Just a good backstory for each one, whatever the details may be, for the purposes of getting women to watch).
How many of us actually WATCH swimming meets anyway? 1/2%? Ever been to a swim meet? Around here it's done for the parents/family of the swimmers- not exactly a world-altering event. Talented swimmers breaking a world record do as much for me as Angolena Jolie having another baby: absolutely nothing. I just can't build concern.
Sure I appreciate the talent. Sure, I appreciate just how good at these things they must be, and how much of their lives was dedicated to getting these things done. But other than getting media mogols and corrupt government officials paid, what does it do?
Maybe I'm just a putz; it's totally possible- :) I don't see much point in sending a pigskin between goalposts, either. My childhood heroes jumped into enemy fire and saved the world from Nazis. Men playing baseball don't hold much excitement for me.
But in their usual style, the TV Programmers are hard at work making you care...filling the screens with this stuff, and wondering what (else) they must do to make people watch. It's just not that exciting...as the previous event's numbers show...and this time there was even less viewer than last time.
Maybe THAT's why it didn't 'melt the internet', because so few people watched?
--- For a good time mail uce@ftc.gov
1998 called. It want's it's resolution back.
Let's see which is less stupid: A proprietary means of viewing media that can only be viewed with the product of one major company, or a completely open video solution that can be viewed with any player in any modern media device or that everyone with a computer that's over 200MHz in speed has access to?
It's no contest. Silverlight is being pushed onto people's computers through subversive means. Back in the good ol' days when we had a Justice Department in America that meant something, Microsoft was convicted of an Anti-trust violation for doing just that.
Ahh, yes. I'm sure everyone breathed a sigh of relief when those three linux-wielding sports fans didn't reduce the bandwidth for the rest of us!
This article was obviously written by LimeLight. Speaking from personal experience their setup is inferior to Akamai. Even sites such as MySpace have dumped LimeLight in favor of Akamai.. An article about how caching helped the internet from melting would have been cool - but this thing goes overboard and is a blatent advertisement for Limelight and bashing of other companies which have a better product. I would hope Slashdot could do better and weed out this crap.
Nobody cares about the Olympics?
Actually, Net Applications shows PPC dropped below half of Mac users nearly a year ago. Some big consumer sites I've talked to recently say PPC is now around 25% of Macs hitting their servers, and dropping quickly.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/11/05/intel-macs-overtake-ppc-macs-in-october
Also, Silverlight 2 is supported on Windows 2000, it's the NBCOlympics.com web site that doesn't support it.
http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/resources/install.aspx?v=2.0#sysreq
My video compression blog
The website said that it was Vista only, on the main page when I checked
Really? Which web site? This is the page you go to if you click for more Silverlight information in the install dialog: http://www.nbcolympics.com/silverlight/index.html
It clearly lists out XP and Mac OS X.
My video compression blog
I posted it another place, but the video was available via Flash as well. No one was being forced.
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deeply or not at all."
NBC has said that the Olympics content will be availble through the end of the year.
The Moonlight guys are looking for help if you want it to work by that deadline!
http://alexzambelli.com/blog/2008/08/16/moonlight-20-help-wanted/
My video compression blog
Found it!
Intel Macs have made up the majority of the Mac internet user base since nearly a year ago.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/11/05/intel-macs-overtake-ppc-macs-in-october
My video compression blog
I did a traceroute from my desktop to the limelight server, and it went from Comcast to Global Crossing to Limelight. ...and Limelight isn't the exclusive provider of the Olympics content.
Ummm, that's Akamai's EXACT business model. Their edge servers are co-located with major ISPs.
Given a certain bitrate, you can get streaming video of the same quality as WMV with more open video formats (like H.264, a variant of MPEG-4 video that Apple is pushing. You can debate how open H.264 but it's an improvement.)
Microsoft wants everyone to download Silverlight so they can force consumers to use their stupid DRM system. Then they plan to use that market position to make a lot of money from paranoid network execs. I don't know how close the NBC-MSFT relationship is (anyone remember MS-NBC? admittedly that relationship crumbled) but I would not be surprised to see Hulu.com go Silverlight only in the next couple of years.
I really think the DNC shouldn't have gone with a DRM platform. We know their voter base supports DRM. Consumers always get screwed over with DRM. The harm to consumers will become apparent when Silverlight gets more widespread adoption. Already you can't watch these events if you aren't on one of the two 'approved' platforms. Of course the cynics will say that the real DNC 'base' is the content industry and corporate America. There's probably some truth in that. Regardless they should want people to use open platforms, because there's no reason to block people from recording or disseminating captured video of their politicians' speeches online.
The Olympics made Silverlight look like a miracle product. In reality it is nothing special. It's a lot easier to scale live video dissemination than video on demand (and the Olympics happened to be the first exposure to Silverlight and the first use of online live video most of my friends have experienced). The great video performance came simply because NBC's contractors used new approaches to stream high-bandwidth video streams in a more scaleable way (quotation from /. on 15 August):
"Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide... so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP's main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP's internal network. In most cases, you're never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video."