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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."
Ummm...I run XP and had no problems at all.
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
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
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.
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.
Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?
I imagine it's to put the US first. Personally I think it's a ridiculous way of ordering things. It encourages playing safe for bronzes, which is boring and contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.
Then again we've got to remember that no official table exists and it's not in the Olympic spirit. Personally, I think an official one should be made just to settle things once and for all. It's all well and good saying people shouldn't rank the countries, but they do and it affects both tactics and funding.
An (America-centric) article on the subject can be found here.
Silverlight 2 (required for NBCOlympics.com) doesn't run on most Macs in the field. It only supports the newer intel-based Macs, which eliminates the 3 Macintoshes I have at home (including my PowerMac G5 with 4 x 2.5GHz cores, 8GB RAM, and 30" Cinema HD display). It also doesn't run on either of the Windows 2000 machines I have at home.
I think that it does. In Europe, funding in many countries has been ruthlessly cut for sports that don't look likely to yield golds. This leads to situations where gynastic teams (for example) will try incredibly high-scoring routines in the last round to nab a gold (and some more funding for the next four years) only to fail and lose the bronze that they could have secured.
If you know your funding just depends on getting a medal, you'll probably consolidate your third place, rather than going all out for a tiny chance of gold.
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...
I'm from Australia, currently living in Norway, and I definitely wanted to watch the Aussies and also be able to watch with English commentary, rather than Norwegian. So I bypassed those regional restrictions to stream video from both NBC and Yahoo7. It can be done with either a VPN or SSH tunnelling to a server in the USA (for NBC) or Australia (for Yahoo7).
If you have a server available to do it, SSH tunnelling is as simple as:
ssh -D 8080 -fN username@example.com
Then set your browser to use localhost:8080 as a SOCKS 5 host.
Otherwise, eurosport apparently has streaming available in Europe, but it costs a few dollars; and, if it works in your country, I'm told youtube.com/beijing2008 has some videos, but I'm not sure which countries that's available in (It doesn't seem to be available in either Australia, Norway or the USA)
Finally, as a last resort, you can try downloading events recorded from TV through either usenet, bittorrent or other P2P networks.
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