World Cup meltdown fails to materialise
Fears that network infrastructures would crumble during the World Cup as fans flocked to video streaming sites to watch games online have failed to materialise. World Cup-related video has resulted in a 30 per cent increase in backbone traffic, according to an analysis by network security firm Arbor Networks. While the increase …
..is not that difficult to implement. If done perfectly, every major switiching station has it's broadcasting server which will serve all the major streams for the DSL lines attached to this switching station.
And these servers will get their data from a hierarchy of servers that culminates at the stream source. You could stream an HD video to every single DSL line of a complete country (including the US) this way and it would probably take much less bandwith-miles than the current youtube traffic.
To some degree this already exists in the form of Video-On-Demand networks run by the big telcos.
I gave up trying to watch the World Cup via the ITV player, so slow and jumpy. But the BBC iPlayer picture was good. When the game was on ITV I ended up using p2p streaming sites which were slightly lower quality but at least the picture was smooth.
Hear, hear - ITV's player is a big bag of shite is what I have discovered through this world cup. Thank god I have no requirement to use it at other times
That's a 30% total traffic increase?
Let's just pray that this online streaming video thingy doesn't become popular then. This is a drop in the ocean when you look at the global viewing figures for World Cup matches.
It could all get very interesting in four years' time when we've got another four years' sales of teh new hawtness streaming meejah devices behind us.
There was no action, no movement of the ball and therefore no scene changes. We were all watching a jpeg.
No, you were not watching a JPEG, just England vs Algeria.
30% increase in backbone network traffic? That sounds, to me, like it could serve - to an attentive US-headquartered sports network, for instance, no I'm not thinking ESPN, the other one.... - as something of a benchmark about interest in the World Cup, and the sport of Football/Soccer itself.
But hey, who am *I* to offer business advice to all those perfect experts, up there....
"problems with ITV's streaming media website in handling demand during the opening game of the tournament"
I should imagine that ITV moved swiftly to lower the demand by switching the stream to a car advert...
iPlayer was virtually unwatchable during England v Algeria - and our fibre broadband link at work was nowhere near saturation, so it's either BT's fault, or the BBC's fault...
FFS why are we not using multicast for stuff like this?
Ah, all the hype over the world cup was not true. Glad I didn't watch it then. Who won?
A while back I saw some stats about how many media relations people the clubs employ- it's amazing!
(that was the most interesting thing I've ever read about football, the game itself seems dull)
I work for a large corp, and to avoid heavy network traffic over both it's ISP and it's own network, it sent everyone a link to it's own hosted stream. That way the majority of people watching were feeding through the on, controlled route rather than lots of random connections over the web.
Another company I know of setup screens in it's own cafe, so most of the staff went to watch it there rather than on a little window over the web - as they put it, better to lose staff within their own building for 90 mins than the network grind to a halt or they all bugger off the pub for the rest of the afternoon
I think networks/companies are just getting smarter about how they handle this stuff...
If IPv6 connections were available, there would be no problem since there would only be one stream per node and the steam would be shared by all the nodes all the way back to the servers. With the current IPv4 (multicast or not) connections, even when multiple users are on the same node they each have their own separate session/stream to the servers thus increasing the load.
It's worth noting that the most commented-on failure in world cup coverage of England was not on the internet, but on TV -- when ITVs HD service failed to show that (depressingly rare) England goal...
I've noticed a distinct lack of stupid flags on cars - I wonder why?
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