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BBC Delivered 2.8PB On Busiest Olympics Day, Reaching 700Gb/s As Wiggo Won Gold
Qedward writes "The BBC has revealed that on the busiest day of its London 2012 Olympics coverage it delivered 2.8 petabytes worth of content, peaking when Bradley Wiggins won gold, where it shifted 700Gb/s. It has also said that over a 24-hour period on the busiest Olympic days it had more traffic to bbc.co.uk than it did for the entire BBC coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2010 games. They revealed they had 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content, which included 12 million requests for video on mobile devices across the whole of the Games. Mobile saw the most uptake at around 6pm when people had left the office but still wanted to keep informed of the latest action. Tablet usage, however, reached a peak at around 9pm, where people were using it as a second screen or as they continued to watch the games in bed."
This seems like an excellent use of torrent streaming. Even if the average feed was a few minutes behind it should be an improvement in data distribution.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
Imagine if it wasn't restricted to a small fraction of internet users.
The BBC used to make its streams available by multicast. If everyone used multicast then they could have streamed the Olympics with not much more than a Japanese home Internet connection.
I'm curious if NBC saw a traffic spike (and how big of one) when they stopped broadcasting the closing ceremony live and switched to streaming it while they switched to whatever the sitcom was.
Bark less. Wag more.
I really REALLY want to see the size of their routing/switching equipment, let alone racks of gear for processing/encoding/streaming. Hitting 700gigs/sec is PRETTY killer.
I had access to about 10 dedicated HD channels on my satellite package here in the middle east. Commercial free, with most announcers either Canadian or British ( the Abu dhabi channels were in Arabic), all from the olympic broadcasting feed. There was also an Olympic news channel and a constant stream of official Olympic documentaries. On ipad & computers there was a further 12 digital streaming channels available, but i could get that working due to low bandwidth. Watching it all was the next best thing than being there in person. I feel sorry for all the North American viewers stuck with recorded footage full of commercials. Oh well, perhaps brazil will prove better?
700Gb/s for a few different streams is ridiculous.
Surely only a tiny fraction of people would be in bed by 9pm, so I can't see that explaining a spike in tablet use mid-evening. My guess is that the main TV was being used to watch normal programs and the iPads (lets face it, the tablets were almost certainly ipads) were being used to follow the olympics out of the corner of the TV watcher's eye.
NBC's online streaming felt like it peaked at 700kbps.
If you bought that bandwidth through Verizon, that would come to $280 million dollars (at their cheapest mobile extra-gig rate), or enough data to exceed the caps on over 12,000 comcast subscribers. Good thing it was is a location where those two don't rule the data channels!
I believe youporn is doing 2.8 petabytes in an hour...
700Gb/s...How many LHCs is that?
2.8PB? What's the big deal? That's only about 3% of the storage capacity of Lt. Commander Data's 'brain'... And he searches that in only a couple seconds..
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
While using data forwarding within the CDN would probably be a win it doesn't work well for this sort of application where you need both high quality and fast distribution to the end clients.
The problem is the client's upstream speed. Most end client systems are ADSL or configured as if they are in that the upstream bandwidth is a tenth or less of the downstream. Bittorrent works kind of like a (safe, self building) "bucket brigade" line where the seeder passes the data to the first client and it passes the data to the second and so on. This means that the third client can receive data only as fast as the second one can upload it.
Bittorrent is is better in that copes with differences between clients, arrivals and disappearances. But it keeps the important limitation that you can only download a "fair share" of the combined upload of all the clients. (Frequently you can download at the same rate you upload)
So if the BBC were delivering 700Gb/s to a million users that is 700kb/s per user, most users could not manage that as an upstream. They might manage a half or even only a quarter which would mean that more than half the total bandwidth would still have to come from the BBC. (The seed box)
What a waste of bandwidth!
A sad day for the clever minds who invented multicast so you don't need to care about 700Gb/s
bickerdyke
Doctor Who is commercially viable on its own, as it is one of the 5 top power brands which between them bring in £300million in sales to the BBC
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
As a primetime NBC Olympics watcher, I was disappointed they didn't show more diving in primetime.
Seriously though, if you work all day, then come home to watch some Olympics in the evening, you'd think the only competitions there are, are some Gymnastics, Swiming, Diving, and Volleyball with a few highlights from track. You'd never know of the numerous other events. NBC coverage was so bad that they would analyze and show every person's dive, replay slowmo with computer analysis, watch them get in the hot tub afterwards and talk with their coach, etc. Then do a quick edit of just the main highlights of another track and field event, then back to more in-depth diving. That or waste even more time by rehashing the 92 dream team. Sorry judo, fencing, weightlifting, etc you don't get any primetime coverage.
This seems like an excellent use of torrent streaming.
I doubt they would go for that since it would be hard to block it based on geographic location. One day the IOC might stop being so amazing hypocritical and practice what they preach ("bringing the world together through sport") by letting each nation's coverage be available worldwide instead of requiring divisive national firewalls...but given the money they make from it it seems doubtful. What was really annoying though was that, after wrestling through a CTV nightmare website of Silverlight a lot of the coverage up there for non-Canadian events was without any commentary.
A BBC engineer gave an interesting talk about their web platform at the PHP UK Conference 2012: "Monitoring your back end for speed and profit"