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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Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Anonymous Coward]

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!

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[mikek2]

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.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[VJ42]

don't worry, you can still watch the highlights or if you're in the USA they're here

OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Auz]

To put the US at the top I suppose...

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[slashqwerty]

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.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Anonymous Coward]

to put the US first?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[nicolas.kassis]

The two they care about (Mac, Windows) works fine. I still thinks it's a pain to have to run a windows vm on Linux to get content. Someone tell me why they couldn't just use flash like espn360 did for the Euro2008?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[KamuZ]

The official rank is always sorted by the amount of gold medals, i guess because they want USA to be on top they go for the alternate "Rank by total medals". Still, you can check the real rank and the rank by total on the official website.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[bickerdyke]

You can find the real rank here: http://www.realmansolympics.com/

But IMHO there is only ONE fair sorting order of a medal rank. http://www.c64sets.com/details.html?id=210

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[MagdJTK]

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.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Brett Johnson]

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.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Blade]

I don't care which way they sort it as long as the UK stays ahead of France.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[jollyreaper]

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!

Allow me to spoil it for you. The guy who runs www.godhatesfags.com, rather homophobic but a surprisingly good swimmer.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[MagdJTK]

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.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[timeOday]

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?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Walkingshark]

good point! silverlight is an abomination, but one which will certainly die out over time. (IMO, of course)

I used to think that about AOL.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[dakameleon]

There's a reasonably official one at the official site: http://results.beijing2008.cn/WRM/ENG/INF/GL/95A/GL0000000.shtml

It has an extra column, rank by total medals, for those searching for some redemption because of sheer numbers of participants. Aussies don't mind the American sorting though, as it puts us fourth :)

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

~96% of the browser market is a pretty good portion I'd say. I doubt the 23 people running Iceweasel would have been the tipping point of the servers exploding.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[bitrex]

The horizontal sweep tubes in my Philco telereciever can't keep up with 480p, you insensitive clod!

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Americium]

Don't use MS office then either? But what could you replace Excel with?

Open office is still a ways to offering me the features I need. And these features were available in Excel 2003, probably even as far back as 97, and they had that sweet flightsim in 97 too ;)

So what should I use instead of Silverlight? Flash?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[socsoc]

I like futbol and all, but how do you play it without touching the ball? Do you will it past the defenders? I'll stick to kicking it...

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[pcolaman]

It didn't melt because they waterproofed the box before Michael Phelps swam by it. Duh!

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[pcolaman]

Why is it an abomination? Just curious to see if you can actually defend your position or if you just mindlessly bash MS because 99% of your friends do as well.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[pcolaman]

I thought Steve Jobs sent out code to make all non-Intel Macs self destruct when they switched over. Now I'm confused...

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[cashman73]

(i.e. I can watch the non-'cool' events, such as judo, wrestling, etc).

But the major events, the ones that generate huge advertising revenue in the US, are still not streamed, in full or live. That includes gymnastics, women's beach volleyball (man's favorite spectator sport?), swimming (unless you count -- gag! -- synchronized swimming, but most slashdotters probably don't consider that a real sport anyways) and most of the track and field events. They've got some select stuff up once it's already happened, like after Michael Phelps already got his golds, but it's not live. Still, I'm kind of surprised that most of the basketball games are streamed -- you would think they'd want those television ad dollars, too?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[gd2shoe]

You sound confused, but you're an AC, so I guess that's a given.

Iceweasel is Firefox for Debian users. It really is that simple.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[I'm Don Giovanni]

While you're at it, why not divide a nation's medal "points" by the nation's population, to really make things fair. Points per capita.

But I got a better idea - how about no point system at all? Which is what they have now. This isn't like a high school or college track meet where points are totaled to determine which side won the meet. It looks like China will win the most gold medals and most medals over all, but there won't be any official statement that "China won the Olympics". The medal count has no formal place in the rules, nor should it. It's just an informal stat that may or may not be interesting for fans to talk about. Bringing in a complicated system to formalize the medal count (or medal "points") into something that's officially meaningful would be pretty lame.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Atario]

You can find the real rank here: http://www.realmansolympics.com/

Jebus, what a stupid site. These appear to be the rules:

1. Women do it = bad
2. Teamwork = bad
3. Metric system = bad
4. Being born not the largest man in the world = bad
5. Some kinds of judging (as of going out of bounds in track) = good, judging of other kinds (as of going out of bounds in gymnastics) = bad
6. Using muscles for brute force = good, using muscles for optimized technique = bad

I repeat: what a stupid site. The fact that this is the second time I've seen this crap modded up to +4 or better in two days does not speak well of Slashdot.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

[Trifthen]

Not to shit all over your rant, but the site is clearly satire. They list China as "Communist China" for fuck's sake! What, does something have to be Maddox level before your spoof sensors start going off?

Be careful or net will turn back into cable TV

[presidenteloco]

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.

Re:Be careful or net will turn back into cable TV

[Solandri]

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 is an "already been solved" problem, and even has a dedicated IP address range (224-239.x.x.x). The multicasting solution is the optimal solution for this type of problem - identical information being broadcast "live" to millions or hundreds of millions of locations.

It's even more efficient than Akami or Limelight, which are more suited for on-demand asynchronous streaming applications like pay-per view and web sites. With Akami or Limelight, the ISP has to send the same video stream to every single viewer (though you can ease the burden with some smart routers). With multicasting, the video stream is sent only once along each network route. If a viewer wishes to see the video, they just tap into that one stream. The IOC and subsequently the ISPs went with the less-optimal solution represented by Limelight because they wanted to have more control over the distribution.

Bandwidth cap

[Eudial]

I'm on a bandwidth cap you insensitive clo(u)d!

Re:Bandwidth cap

[ScrewMaster]

I'm on a bandwidth cap you insensitive clo(u)d!

I am too ... but I have Comcast so I don't know what it is.

I wish it had

[philspear]

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.

New switching and routing technology.

[cuby]

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.

Or....nobody cared

[Gothmolly]

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.

Re:Or....nobody cared

[strelitsa]

NBC doesn't seem to think that nobody's watching. They're claiming American Idol-esque numbers so far.

Re:Or....nobody cared

[pla]

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.

Re:Or....nobody cared

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched the womens' marathon, last night,

That was an opportunity for pure MST3K gold.

Announcers: "And here the runners are passing Tienanmen Square, in front of the Gate of Eternal Peace".

Audience: where absolutely nothing happened! It's eternally peaceful!

Announcers: "Mao's portrait is changed annually, and has a different color backdrop every year"

Audience: *stunned silence*, mentioning trivia like that while skipping over the massacre was just too much for even the most cynical of us to improve upon.

Annoucners: "It was once a gate to the Forbidden City, where the Emperor held court, but after the Revolution, was opened up to the Chinese people..."

Audience: "And pay no attention to the grease spot where that guy stood in front of the column of tanks..."

Announcers: "And next the course goes through the first modern University in China..."

Audience: "...whose enrollment numbers suffered a mysterious drop a few years back, or, at least, they would have dropped if anything had happened at the last landmark, which, of course, it didn't..."

Re:Or....nobody cared

[Blade]

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.

Re:Or....nobody cared

[ACMENEWSLLC]

The US Open was more popular on our Network than the Olympics. Of course, we figured out how to block Limelight after the USOpen so that helped too.. They make it almost impossible to simply QoS them because of this infrastructure.

Re:Or....nobody cared

[Gothmolly]

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.

Peer Guardian ...

[Tink2000]

... 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.

That's not the reason

[mobby_6kl]

I thought it was because nobody actually cares enough to watch.

Re:That's not the reason

[MeditationSensation]

And they truly are the *heaviest* if you know what I mean. Hur hur.

Re:NBC only provided streams to a small % of US PC

[Anonymous Coward]

Ummm...I run XP and had no problems at all.

Because it was about 2% of YouTubes traffic?

[d34thm0nk3y]

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

Re:Because it was about 2% of YouTubes traffic?

[clang_jangle]

And of course, that would be the real story, rather than the slashvertisement for Limelight Networks via perlow's blog we ended up with. But hey, perlow and Limelight are happy, and that's the what matters, right?

What about Neutrality?

[Adrian Lopez]

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?

Re:What about Neutrality?

[Dwedit]

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.

Re:What about Neutrality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Answer: has nothing to do with it. Let me demonstrate why by switching a couple words around:

Let me get this straight. World of Warcraft content is getting special treatment due to commercial deals between Blizzard, Blizzard's Hosting Networks, and a bunch of subscribers?

Do you see how both your question and my altered question have absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality?

Re:What about Neutrality?

[Stray7Xi]

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.

Re:What about Neutrality?

[Kalriath]

The commercial deals are just to co-locate content. You too can co-locate content with your ISP as part of a commercial deal. How can this bode anything for net neutrality anyway?

Re:The next time someone uses the word

[thermian]

"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)

In a manner of speaking the entire Internet is a cloud of computers.

AAAARRGGHH!

[whimper]

Re:A good old fashion slashdotting...

[X10]

NBCOlympics.com doesn't support linux for their videos. That's why the internet didn't melt: linux users can't watch.

Akamai "don't use public Internet" either

[anti-NAT]

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.

I can tell you why in Australia...

[spoco2]

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.

Re:A good old fashion slashdotting...

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

NBCOlympics.com doesn't support linux for their videos.

The Olympics, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

Re:NBC only provided streams to a small % of US PC

[HappySmileMan]

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

Yep

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

Re:A good old fashion slashdotting...

[Brett Johnson]

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.

it didn't melt because..

[Anonymous Coward]

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?'

Re:actually...

[jtdennis]

sure, when you add the ?sort=gold it matches the other sites, however if you just go to http://stats.cbc.ca/olympics_medals.asp it sorts by total medal count by default, which is what NBC is doing.

Pushing a protocol...

[Gription]

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.

This has nothing to do with "trunk capacity"!

[dj42]

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!

Most of the world can't watch...

[Roger W Moore]

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?

Re:Most of the world can't watch...

[Lachlan Hunt]

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.

Re:News flash...

[entrylevel]

Nobody was. This is an ad for Limelight.

Re:Who cares.

[Neoprofin]

Really? Almost 2/3rds of the people in the world watched the opening ceremony? I appreciate that the Wikipedia article cites their source, but the article it quotes doesn't give any metric for their estimation.

I can't believe that between people who couldn't watch it, people who didn't want to watch it, and people who just didn't despite urge and ability, that 4 billion people still caught it.

Tell me again how that is NOT like Akamai ...

[mxs]

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.

ZDnet parrots a press release and it's front page?

[rustman]

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.