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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."
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 sincerely think NBC & Limelight did a good job. The video is smooth, free, and wonderfully thorough (i.e. I can watch the non-'cool' events, such as judo, wrestling, etc).
Granted, I HATE it's not open-source friendly, but that's a way off goal (what with the NBC/M$ alliance).
Nevertheless, I take this year's online coverage as a step in the Right Direction.
I thought it was because nobody actually cares enough to watch.
NBC doesn't seem to think that nobody's watching. They're claiming American Idol-esque numbers so far.
Which means, comparatively, that nobody watched.
American Idol and various other record-breaking series' don't even come close to the numbers for major events like the superbowl or the olympics. Claiming that this year's olympics "only" did as well as American idol amounts to a record-breaking poor viewership.
Another reason it didn't melt the internet is because SilverLight isn't supported on all platforms thus many people couldn't even access it.
To put the US at the top I suppose...
It is always a good idea to praise your neighbor when that neighbor is low on oil and high on nuclear weapons while you are high on oil but low on nuclear weapons.
In this case, there is a distributed bunch of servers, so when a user requests a file, it's not even reaching the internet backbone, it's reaching a dedicated video server which is local to the ISP. Net neutrality has nothing to do with this, this is just agreements between companies to make highly demanded video available to users without costing the ISPs as much bandwidth.
Yes it does. Because it places a content provider onto a special tier. Why do you think many ISP's cached it locally, because they were getting paid. That's the primary fear of net neutrality. That if you don't pay both your ISP and your customer's ISP the data will be deprioritized. The road to a non-neutral net starts with content providers voluntarily paying for "higher tiers".
The very fact that ISP's choose what goes on their caching servers, means its non-neutral. Even if it was made free and the ISP's used discretion accepting videos, still non-neutral. The only neutral network is one the ISP doesn't make choices for me on what content gets prioritized.
Actually, this is the Olympics I've watched the most. I've just not sat down and watched it on the TV like previous years. This is the first time I've been able to sit at my PC and watch the bits I was interested in on the BBC website, and then fast forward through some other stuff the Sky+ box recorded, and then catch some stuff on the Sky+ interactive section on the BBC, and then head back to the PC and watch a bit more on iPlayer or the BBC news site. For me, it's really brought home the changes in broadcasting major sporting events that have taken place in only four years.
Ranking by total medials is absurd, because it gives equal weight to bronze as gold. If you believe that, why award medals at all, or bother to count them?
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.
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?
If you don't count the famous dancer crippled in pre-production rehearsal, or the lipsync of the national anthem, or the 56 kids that weren't really 56 different ethnic groups, or that the opening fireworks were faked, or the fact that most of the events are not full of spectators to keep crowd sizes down, or the 1000s of homeless animals killed to clean up the streets, or the protesters who were sent for re-education through labor, or the fact that they closed most of the factories and forbid people to drive to clean the air, or that they pumped the clouds full of silver nitrate to make it rain, or that they hospitalized their homeless as insane so that the city looked nicer, or that most citizens lack basic freedoms, then yes, it runs just like clockwork.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.