It seems that my questioning of the Internet's ability to cope with today's inauguration was justified. Ironically, I was in the car, listening on radio, so was unable to test for myself, but most people seem to be reporting problems with most services: ABC, C-SPAN, CNN and CBS all failed to offer a TV experience for all their viewers.
Once again, some of the claims being made are outlandish, with CNN reporting 14m streams (whatever that means) before the inauguration. Limelight claim that they can cope with 3TB of concurrent streaming - that's around 6m viewers; but if you take the CNN figures, add in the other twenty major international news services and there were probably 60 - 100m people trying to view online (it being lunchtime in Europe added to this). That's probably three times what all CDNs can cope with (and I'm already cynical about the CDNs' claims), so the outcome is not unexpected. We seems to have misunderestimated the demand....
However, there were some developments which have contributed to the what TV will look like in the future.
It was an inaugural speech with mixed tones, which had a mixed response and a mixed delivery online.
Now, the real work beings in building the infrastructure for the future.
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