digitalbuilt

First off I didn’t even get a chance to watch any of the inauguration, I was streaming a surfing event in California.  So this is more of a reaction to a piece on TechCrunch that went counter to many other stories on the day.  While UStream were busy patting themselves on the back, others were noticing it wasn’t all that smooth.   Sure the numbers sound good, I am reading about 3.5 TB/s at it’s peak, almost all of it Flash Video.   UStream stated it served up 3.8 million streams, up to 400,000 concurrent.

But in reality many people were struggling to catch a glimpse.  The article, by @erickschonfeld, points out that even the mighty CNN was having  issues.  His main point being that even with the CDNs prepared for a big day, the nature of the system limits the number of simultaneous views.

Now this is nothing new, the “series of tubes” that are the Internet do not enjoy the same broadcast nature as radio waves or over-the-air TV signals.  A radio tower outputs the same thing whether 1 person is watching, or 1,000.  Each time a new viewer on UStream comes on, another section of that “pipe” fills with data.  So how do you build capacity that is suited to a one day spike such as this, while controlling costs for the rest of the year when the traffic isn’t there? 

I think the real test will be when a huge news event hits without warning.  They had months to get ready for the inauguration, what happens when there is online interest of a similar scale for something that is unforseen?  Then we will see the democritisation of online video, if CNN.com (or more directly their CDN) struggles to handle the load, the smaller outlets have a chance to make a name.

Reference:
How each site fared – Link
Traffic reports  – Link
How Akamai handled it - Link