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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."
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!
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 thought it was because nobody actually cares enough to watch.
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
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.
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..."
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.
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?'
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.