At the time we started working this particular arrangement, more than a year ago, BitTorrent simply wasn't a workable option. I've not revisited it since then, but it's time to at least take another look.
Thanks,
Brian Dunbar
Internet Services Manager
NASA Public Affairs
We've gotten a lot of e-mail like this, so I thought it was worth addressing in a forum where folks who take a real interest in the technology spend time.
We stream video clips, rather than making them available for downloading, to manage our bandwidth usage. We have a fixed-priced contract with Akamai to provide content delivery, including HTML, RealMedia, QuickTime streaming and some Windows streams. That contract includes some hard caps on bandwidth, and though I give a lot of credit to Akamai for working with us on those caps, they are a business in the end. (Yahoo! provides most of our Windows streams as part of a separate agreement.) As you might imagine, during shuttle missions and other high-visibility events, we got a lot of traffic, the bulk of which is for live video streams. During last week's launch, we had more than a million webcast streams go out on the 4th, with a peak of more than 257,000 concurrent streams at launch. We were pushing data out at 52 gbps.
We continue to have at least 10,000 streams going out during the mission, even in the deep overnight, ramping up for major events like spacewalks. Streaming the video clips makes more efficient use of our bandwidth, as the user can watch the whole thing or cut it off when she feels like it. If the latter, our servers go on to other things. Add it all up, and we have to be fairly careful about managing available bandwidth. We do have some clips available for download at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/index.ht ml
Perhaps it's not the most elegant or perfect solution, but given finite resources and the need to be cross-platform, 508 accessible and as timely as possible, it's optimal, especially for the broad general audience that www.nasa.gov primarily serves. The alternative would be to have a lot less video available.
Cheers,
Brian Dunbar
Internet Services Manager
NASA Public Affairs
Slashdot Mirror
At the time we started working this particular arrangement, more than a year ago, BitTorrent simply wasn't a workable option. I've not revisited it since then, but it's time to at least take another look.
Thanks,
Brian DunbarInternet Services Manager
NASA Public Affairs
We've gotten a lot of e-mail like this, so I thought it was worth addressing in a forum where folks who take a real interest in the technology spend time.
We stream video clips, rather than making them available for downloading, to manage our bandwidth usage. We have a fixed-priced contract with Akamai to provide content delivery, including HTML, RealMedia, QuickTime streaming and some Windows streams. That contract includes some hard caps on bandwidth, and though I give a lot of credit to Akamai for working with us on those caps, they are a business in the end. (Yahoo! provides most of our Windows streams as part of a separate agreement.) As you might imagine, during shuttle missions and other high-visibility events, we got a lot of traffic, the bulk of which is for live video streams. During last week's launch, we had more than a million webcast streams go out on the 4th, with a peak of more than 257,000 concurrent streams at launch. We were pushing data out at 52 gbps.
We continue to have at least 10,000 streams going out during the mission, even in the deep overnight, ramping up for major events like spacewalks. Streaming the video clips makes more efficient use of our bandwidth, as the user can watch the whole thing or cut it off when she feels like it. If the latter, our servers go on to other things. Add it all up, and we have to be fairly careful about managing available bandwidth. We do have some clips available for download at http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/podcasting/index.ht ml
Perhaps it's not the most elegant or perfect solution, but given finite resources and the need to be cross-platform, 508 accessible and as timely as possible, it's optimal, especially for the broad general audience that www.nasa.gov primarily serves. The alternative would be to have a lot less video available.
Cheers,
Brian Dunbar
Internet Services Manager
NASA Public Affairs