August 14th, 2008
Next Question: A Whole Lot of Traffic Shaping Going On, With Olympics Video?
The sky didn’t fall this week, with NBC’s delivery of live events from 25 sports at www.nbcolympics.com. But now, Brick Eksten, the chief executive of Digital Rapids, is wondering: Has there been a whole lot of traffic shaping going on, to make sure the streams appear on computer and cell phone screens with nary a hiccup?
Eksten is the fellow who last Thursday told Between The Lines: “We’re going to find out whether the Internet is going to melt under the weight of video in a couple days.’’ He bet that the 2,200 hours of live coverage NBC planned had a 5 to 10 percent chance of crumpling Internet usage in North America.
His biggest worry was that the streams, which his firm is responsible for encoding before they are shipped across the Pacific Ocean, would break down en route. Live events could be interrupted, he figured by “unforeseen compromises” in the networks carrying the content, by a fiber cut along the way, by problems with content distribution networks used to carrying files but not large amounts of live streams that require little to no latency, or within local networks, where consumption by lots of users at the same time might cause delays.
Eksten doesn’t think he was a Chicken Little for worrying about breakdowns that didn’t occur or an Internet that didn’t melt down. “There was every chance this would break,” he says, even now. Live streaming on this scale is much more demanding, he says, than playback of previously loaded video snacks at YouTube.
In any event, the delivery of the streams has proven to be close to “statistically flawless.” And other uses of the Internet, from surfing to email to twittering, seemed unaffected.
Which led Eksten this Thursday, in a follow-up conversation with Between The Lines, to wonder about whether Internet service providers throughout America used a lot of traffic shaping, to give priority to Olympics video streams and delay data packets being transmitted for other purposes.
“If they did a lot of traffic shaping, I’d like to know what they did,’’ he said. On the other hand, “if Internet service providers did nothing and all those streams just worked, then all their concerns about (not having enough) bandwidth” for heavy-duty video applications would appear to be unfounded, he said. Olympic streaming, you might argue, unleashes a different kind of bit torrent, than the one that caused the dustup between Comcast and the company called BitTorrent.
Interesting question? What do you think? Whole lot of traffic shaping going on … or not?
Tom Steinert-Threlkeld is editor-in-chief of Securities Industry News, as well as a long-time media, technology and business journalist. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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| 08/14/08
