Tomorrow's Promise

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.

Comments

Unknown said…
I watched CNN's feed of the live speech with no problem. It took 30 seconds or so before I had a picture, but after that it was a much better size picture than I expected. I logged on a few minutes before the swearing-in (only Obama - didn't see Biden). I have to imagine that was peak request time. One of the things that probable compounded the problems (and inflated the stats) was that anybody who had a hiccup with one provider probably tried to load 2 or 3 others simultaneously. Still, this was far better than 9/11 when you couldn't load CNN/s home page until they simplified it. Even Drudge choked on that one.
Iolo Jones said…
Good point!