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back to article 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 …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Go

    A Proper Broadcasting Network

    ..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.

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  2. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    The final

    The final is yet to come!

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  3. gimbal
    Paris Hilton

    Impressive, Actually

    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....

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Watching online

    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.

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    1. Chris Collins
      Reply Icon

      Agree

      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

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  5. HighlightAll
    Boffin

    A simple question of compression

    There was no action, no movement of the ball and therefore no scene changes. We were all watching a jpeg.

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    1. Gaz Jay
      Reply Icon

      Not a JPEG...

      No, you were not watching a JPEG, just England vs Algeria.

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  6. TeeCee Gold badge
    Alert

    "....record numbers topping 800,000 concurrent connections."

    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.

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  7. Stu J
    FAIL

    Yes but...

    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?

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  8. Annihilator
    Coat

    ITV contingency

    "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...

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  9. Tim #3

    Umm

    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)

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  10. John Macintyre

    surely also depends on implementation

    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...

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  11. Graham Marsden
    WTF?

    "Tweetstorm"

    Is that like Twatdangle?

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  12. Robert A. Rosenberg
    Boffin

    IPv6 Multicast to the Rescue

    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.

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  13. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    the most commented-on coverage failure was on TV

    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...

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  14. Willum08
    WTF?

    Has there been some kind of game on then?

    I've noticed a distinct lack of stupid flags on cars - I wonder why?

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