Why the Olympics Didn't Melt the Internet

perlow tips his blog entry over at ZDNet on why the Internet didn't melt when millions of users streamed 480i video for a week. The short answer is Limelight Networks of Tempe, Arizona. "[W]hy the Internet didn't 'melt' is quite simple — [Limelight is] completely 'off the cloud.' In other words, unlike Akamai and similar content caching providers, their system isn't deployed over the public Internet... Limelight has partnered with over 800 broadband Internet providers worldwide... so that the content is either co-located in the same facility as your ISP's main communications infrastructure, or it leases a dedicated Optical Carrier line so that it actually appears as part of your ISP's internal network. In most cases, you're never even leaving your Tier 1 provider to get the video."

A good old fashion slashdotting...

...should dampen their spirits! ...if this were 1999 and Slashdot still wielded the power

Re:A good old fashion slashdotting...

NBCOlympics.com doesn't support linux for their videos.

The Olympics, it seems, is not without a sense of irony. [netcraft.com]

Most of the world can't watch...

That's why the internet didn't melt: linux users can't watch.

Funny, but the real reason it didn't melt is because they refuse to stream video across international boundaries so most of the world cannot access it. Living in Canada my wife cannot access the NBC videos and I cannot access the BBC videos. Given the UK's fantastic performance so far this Olympics is it incredibly frustrating to have to read about it or to catch the odd event on CBC - who actually are very good at covering non-Canadian centric events but obviously don't give foreign medal wins top billing so they are hard to catch unless you watch them live.

Given that the Olympic ideal is bringing the world together perhaps they might like to extend that to web video coverage and allow all of us to watch our home countries athletes wherever we are in the world instead of going out of their way to implement technological barriers to obstruct this?

Pushing a protocol...

Obviously MS has an in with msNBC but the choice to force the use of a relatively uncommon 'Flash wannabe' is close to Vista marketing tactics.

If given a choice any web designer would choose Flash or just go straight for wmv/mpg/avi. The only reason to choose an unadopted distribution method is because of the arrogance of the distributor.

Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

Fuck. I haven't watched the Olympics at all because I didn't have access to a tv (or a tivo). But for a change, the networks got their asses in order and actually put decent streaming video up? Now you tell me!

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

don't worry, you can still watch the highlights [bbc.co.uk] or if you're in the USA they're here [nbc.com]

OT: Why do the US media sites rank the medal table [nbcolympics.com] different from everyone [bbc.co.uk] else [france24.com]?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

Why do the US media sites rank the medal table different from everyone else?

I imagine it's to put the US first. Personally I think it's a ridiculous way of ordering things. It encourages playing safe for bronzes, which is boring and contrary to the spirit of the Olympics.

Then again we've got to remember that no official table exists and it's not in the Olympic spirit. Personally, I think an official one should be made just to settle things once and for all. It's all well and good saying people shouldn't rank the countries, but they do and it affects both tactics and funding.

An (America-centric) article on the subject can be found here [wsj.com].

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

I think that it does. In Europe, funding in many countries has been ruthlessly cut for sports that don't look likely to yield golds. This leads to situations where gynastic teams (for example) will try incredibly high-scoring routines in the last round to nab a gold (and some more funding for the next four years) only to fail and lose the bronze that they could have secured.

If you know your funding just depends on getting a medal, you'll probably consolidate your third place, rather than going all out for a tiny chance of gold.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

To put the US at the top I suppose...

It is always a good idea to praise your neighbor when that neighbor is low on oil and high on nuclear weapons while you are high on oil but low on nuclear weapons.

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

Ranking by total medials is absurd, because it gives equal weight to bronze as gold. If you believe that, why award medals at all, or bother to count them?

Re:Wait, who had 480i streaming video?

Another reason it didn't melt the internet is because SilverLight isn't supported on all platforms thus many people couldn't even access it.

Be careful or net will turn back into cable TV

If the general cloud does not also support high-bandwidth content viewing, the pipe providers (cable cos) will grab our throats and shake us down for money.

This trend ought to be resisted, by net neutrality legislation or just more peer to peer innovation.

Bandwidth cap

I'm on a bandwidth cap you insensitive clo(u)d!

Re:Bandwidth cap

I'm on a bandwidth cap you insensitive clo(u)d!

I am too ... but I have Comcast so I don't know what it is.

I wish it had

I kind of wish the internet HAD melted. Not only would that have made a cool youtube video, but I waste too much time on the internet.

Come to think of it, I wouldn't have been able to view the youtube video then.

Also come to think of it, I'm wasting time on the internet right now.

That's not the reason

I thought it was because nobody actually cares enough to watch.

Because it was about 2% of YouTubes traffic?

Maybe nobody was watching:

Tom Steinert-Threlkeld has a great rundown of the numbers behind this weekend's Olympic coverage. The highest day of coverage was on August 10th and it saw about 3.42 million video streams with 66.7 million page views and an average time spent on the site of 15 minutes. Pretty good numbers but as the BTL piece notes, that's only about 2% of a typical YouTube day. So it didn't exactly take the world by storm.

reference [zdnet.com]

Akamai "don't use public Internet" either

I work for an ISP in Australia, we and a number of other local ISPs have local Akamai clusters. I haven't RTFA, mainly because if the summary isn't right, then the article probably isn't right either. It is mutually beneficial for content providers and ISPs to host content locally. For the content provider, they have more content distribution points, which is a selling point to use with their customers. For the ISP, it shifts typically fairly large amounts and "types" of traffic off of their Internet transit links, saving them money.

Yep

Not sure how big you have to be, but if you are of sufficient size, Akamai will approach you. They did to the university where I work. Their deal was simple: They cover all the costs, you put their computers in your datacentre. Basically the provide a number of cache engine computers and a switch to connect them to. You then mess with your routing so that traffic prefers those over their central site.

It's win-win. It costs you nothing other than some staff time, reduces your bandwidth usage (we knocked off an average of like 5mbps) and increases the speeds your users see. They of course also get the benefit of reduced bandwidth usage.

I'm sure they don't do it for every tiny ISP out there, but you you are of reasonable size (may be if you have your own ASN), expect Akamai to take notice and come offering cache engines.

it didn't melt because..

1. Timezones: The majority of content was encoded outside of the timezone for North America where the traffic was targeted so there was a huge opportunity to store and forward the content, in this case on limelight although it could have been handled by any of the major CDNs such as Akamai or Highwinds
2. I think there was a lot of last second optimizations done at the ISPs to make sure that fingers didn't point at them.

the original article was really speaking to the live streams which cannot be cached beyond a few seconds. Lets pull up the statistics.

http://nbcumv.com/release_detail.nbc/sports-20080814000000-olympicsontrackto.html

22 million streams served, 4 million of which were live streams, and additional 3 million stream served via the mobile platform and other VOD outlets.

Its going to break a lot of records. But i think that the original article and the OP here missed the point totally. If an event of this magnitude can go off with hardly a hitch, then why is it exactly that we need (the ISPs need) traffic shaping, bandwidth caps, and throttling? The ISPs among others have been saying for years that the internet is going to melt under the load of video, and using it as an excuse to add these technologies. The article on ZDnet asks the question.. is it really and we will find out in a few days (article was prior to the olympics). The real question remains that if 22 million videos at an average of 20 minutes per video and an average bitrate of 700kb weren't enough (3.5Million hours of content) in ADDITION to whatever people are doing everyday then 'why do we need traffic shaping and bandwidth management?'

Re:Or....nobody cared

Actually, this is the Olympics I've watched the most. I've just not sat down and watched it on the TV like previous years. This is the first time I've been able to sit at my PC and watch the bits I was interested in on the BBC website, and then fast forward through some other stuff the Sky+ box recorded, and then catch some stuff on the Sky+ interactive section on the BBC, and then head back to the PC and watch a bit more on iPlayer or the BBC news site. For me, it's really brought home the changes in broadcasting major sporting events that have taken place in only four years.

Re:Or....nobody cared

NBC doesn't seem to think that nobody's watching. They're claiming American Idol-esque numbers so far.

Which means, comparatively, that nobody watched.

American Idol and various other record-breaking series' don't even come close to the numbers for major events like the superbowl or the olympics. Claiming that this year's olympics "only" did as well as American idol amounts to a record-breaking poor viewership.

Re:Or....nobody cared

I watched the womens' marathon, last night,

That was an opportunity for pure MST3K gold.

Announcers: "And here the runners are passing Tienanmen Square, in front of the Gate of Eternal Peace".

Audience: where absolutely nothing happened! It's eternally peaceful!

Announcers: "Mao's portrait is changed annually, and has a different color backdrop every year"

Audience: *stunned silence*, mentioning trivia like that while skipping over the massacre was just too much for even the most cynical of us to improve upon.

Annoucners: "It was once a gate to the Forbidden City, where the Emperor held court, but after the Revolution, was opened up to the Chinese people..."

Audience: "And pay no attention to the grease spot where that guy stood in front of the column of tanks..."

Announcers: "And next the course goes through the first modern University in China..."

Audience: "...whose enrollment numbers suffered a mysterious drop a few years back, or, at least, they would have dropped if anything had happened at the last landmark, which, of course, it didn't..."

Re:The next time someone uses the word

"cloud" in reference to the internet he will he recieve a digital kick in the balls.

Fuck "clouds" and "Web2.0".
(But fuck clouds more)

In a manner of speaking the entire Internet is a cloud of computers.

AAAARRGGHH!

[whimper]

Re:What about Neutrality?

In this case, there is a distributed bunch of servers, so when a user requests a file, it's not even reaching the internet backbone, it's reaching a dedicated video server which is local to the ISP. Net neutrality has nothing to do with this, this is just agreements between companies to make highly demanded video available to users without costing the ISPs as much bandwidth.

Yes it does. Because it places a content provider onto a special tier. Why do you think many ISP's cached it locally, because they were getting paid. That's the primary fear of net neutrality. That if you don't pay both your ISP and your customer's ISP the data will be deprioritized. The road to a non-neutral net starts with content providers voluntarily paying for "higher tiers".

The very fact that ISP's choose what goes on their caching servers, means its non-neutral. Even if it was made free and the ISP's used discretion accepting videos, still non-neutral. The only neutral network is one the ISP doesn't make choices for me on what content gets prioritized.