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BBC Delivered 2.8PB On Busiest Olympics Day, Reaching 700Gb/s As Wiggo Won Gold

Posted by Soulskill on from the going-for-gold-in-the-bandwidth-olympics dept.

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."

25 of 96 comments (clear)

  1. Torrent stream? by LoudMusic · · Score: 2

    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.

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    1. Re:Torrent stream? by rjr162 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Pretty sure they used a CDN or two to handle the traffic, and its possible the CDN uses a hybrid mode which works basically like combining a regular CDN server network with a p2p torrent network

    2. Re:Torrent stream? by madprof · · Score: 2

      No one wants to get the result late though.

    3. Re:Torrent stream? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

      The BBC used HTTP Dynamic Streaming for the Olympics streams, handing out 4 second fragments of video in a range of bitrates over HTTP. Akamai and Limelight did the heavy lifting, but no special client software was needed beyond the flash-based player on the BBC site.

    4. Re:Torrent stream? by BasilBrush · · Score: 3, Interesting

      So, you're browsing the internet and watching the streaming video, as many people do. You inadvertantly find out the result of the 100 meters on facebook/twitter minutes before the race even starts on your video.

      No, people won't accept minutes of delay for "live" events. A few seconds, yes, so long as one isn't betting on the event. But a few seconds is useless for torrent type distribution.

  2. A fraction of what it could have been by bobbutts · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Imagine if it wasn't restricted to a small fraction of internet users.

    1. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by madprof · · Score: 2

      That's down to the broadcaster in your country. Fail to see why other broadcasters could not have done the same.

    2. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by AGMW · · Score: 4, Insightful
      I understand there was big uptake on VPN services from the US to get around the poor coverage so folks could get the BBC if they wanted, though I don't see why it couldn't be offered as a paid service to offset our licence fee.

      I'd have to say the coverage by the beeb was excellent and well worth the fee, and I'm not a sports fan!

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    3. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by petermgreen · · Score: 5, Informative

      though I don't see why it couldn't be offered as a paid service to offset our licence fee.

      Trouble is in a lot of cases the BBC can't legally do that either because they bought UK only rights to the content in question from the content owners or for content they created themselves they have sold exclusive country specific rights to foreign broadcasters.

      So any subscription based iPlayer for foreigners would end up with only a fraction of the content the UK iPlayer gets.

      Also afaict the BBC gets traffic to most UK ISPs virtually free due to peering agreements whereas for foreigners they would have to pay transit fees. The prices for foreigners would have to be high enough to reflect this.

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    4. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by madprof · · Score: 2

      This is the reason, I think, why they let F1 go almost wholesale to Sky. Right decision. And the streaming held up very well.

    5. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by iserlohn · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Don't forget about the 24 *extra* HD channels that the BBC put on just for the Olympics. Was able to drop into any one of the Olympic events at any time through the red button, or just by navigating to the correct channel on my Freesat box. It really did blow my mind. Above all - no ads! The TV license is normally pretty good value for money, but the Olympic coverage was a cut above. Really feel for those that had to endure NBC.

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    6. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by chrb · · Score: 4, Informative

      The BBC also recorded some of the events in Super Hi Vision Engadget has a review: "while watching the swimming event and cut-down highlights of the opening ceremony, there were moments when we could almost have believed we were looking not at a projected image, but rather through a window direct onto the Olympic Stadium or Aquatics Center itself."

    7. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by cpu6502 · · Score: 4, Informative

      In the U.S. NBC has carried the excluive contract from 1992 through 2020. Apparently the International Olympic Committee likes them. The company paid $1.18 billion for the exclusive U.S. television rights, and they sold $1.3 billion in advertising, so that's a profit (versus 2006/10 when they lost 0.2 billion each). Here are NBC's stats:

      - 32 million viewers during Primetime broadcast/reruns (highest level since the 1976 Olympics)
      - 73% of Americans followed on television. 17% online. 12% on social media sites.
      - "London's 219.4 million total viewers (you were a viewer if you watched at least six minutes) made NBC's Games the most-watched TV event ever, breaking Beijing's record of 215 million viewers."
      - NBC's digital stats after Week 1 of the Olympics (so the total pull is probably double)

      â34 Million Live Streams, Up 333% vs. Beijing
      â744 Million Page Views, Up 160 Million from Beijing
      â6.2 Million Devices Verified by Cable, Satellite and Telco Customers

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    8. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by SimonTheSoundMan · · Score: 3, Informative

      BBC also transmitted in 3D.

    9. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by mattsday · · Score: 3, Insightful

      The problem with what you say is that NBCs coverage was profit driven. They tape-delayed shows to ensure prime-time audiences, cut large elements out of the opening/closing ceremonies and most events were not free to watch online without a cable subscription.

      Whilst the BBC and the Television License is a subject of debate in the UK, it's very narrow-minded to say the $230 USD (not $300) brings only dramas. Comedy, news, current affairs, radio, light entertainment, online streaming, education and a whole load of other content ad-free.

      I haven't looked up the figures, but my bet is that the BBC channels are amongst the most popular TV and Radio offerings in the UK - people clearly seem to like what they produce (myself included, I would pay the license fee just to have Radio 4).

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    10. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by F.Ultra · · Score: 3, Informative

      Don't know about the BBC in particular but it is very common here in Europe to show the Olympics live regardless of the time. Then there are of course sumamries and tape delays shown during the normal day time for people who was asleep during the live events.

    11. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by Patch86 · · Score: 2

      It's not one channel. For that $230 a year, there are 10 TV channels, 10 national radio stations (and around 50 local ones), plus the website (including the comprehensive news and sport sections, equal to any daily newspaper). They're also in charge of certain public services, such as televising parliament sessions (BBC Parliament is one of the channels- no commercial station would broadcast wall-to-wall parliamentary debate, so it is a unique service).

      Excluding the print and local stuff, at about $2.30 per national broadcast per year I'd say it's pretty good value most years.

      In other words- it's not really like PBS.

    12. Re:A fraction of what it could have been by madprof · · Score: 2

      There are some things missing from here, sadly, and US customers should demand these next time:

      - live streaming coverage of every sport (if the UK can have it then why can't the US?)
      - live coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies UNCUT

      Rio is a friendlier time zone so it should be easier. Let's see what happens.

  3. Multicast by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Multicast by Trepidity · · Score: 5, Informative

      Unfortunately, multicast basically doesn't work on the current internet, at least not for most users, because most networks don't properly forward it. The MBONE, a 1990s overlay/tunnelled network, was probably the closest it's ever gotten to general deployment outside specific controlled contexts. 2001's RFC 3170 on deployment difficulties is largely still accurate, with the exception of its first sentence, "IP Multicast will play a prominent role on the Internet in the coming years."

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    2. Re:Multicast by Bengie · · Score: 2

      IPv6 supports multicast correctly. I remember reading about IP-TV multicast testing that was going on from Europe to Australia over open internet.

  4. Re:Network Gear? by Bert64 · · Score: 2

    It will just be regular cisco kit like 6500 series switches...
    They won't have pushed 700gb through a single device, the bbc has peering with most of the major isps in the uk and the 700gb figure will be combined across a large number of peering and transit links.

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  5. Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond... by gubon13 · · Score: 2

    NBC's online streaming felt like it peaked at 700kbps.

  6. Re:Network Gear? by isorox · · Score: 2

    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.

    Try Akamai!

    The BBC uses akamai to deliver a lot of content

  7. What a waste of bandwidth! by bickerdyke · · Score: 2

    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

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