10 ms·

455 Tb of live streaming were transferred during the Olympic Games Rio 2016

147 points by dreampeppers99 10y ago

liquidise 10y ago
> Globo.com only had rights for streaming the content to Brazil... with peak of 433K simultaneous users This is a neat writeup but the bigger point here is highlighted by the opening statements. While i get the massive revenue channel the olympics provides, i can't help but feel that the media stranglehold over the events has gone too far. The olympics represent one of the only instances of global unity through competition left in the world. Much the same way the world cup brings small and proud nations into the global stage, the olympics has the same power. Unfortunately, it is easier for me to find 20 year old simpsons clips on youtube than it is for me to find a video of Bolt's 100m heat from last week. Who benefits from this apart from NBC? I can list approx. 7.4B people who don't. As a lover of capitalism this all leaves me conflicted. But i would point to the olympic coverage as the instance of corporations going too far with their constricting of media sharing.
- johansch 10y ago
  I feel the same. I've been travelling during the past month. Accessing video content from the Olympics has been extremely hard. I think the IOC might be shooting themselves in both of their feet here. If they don't open open up, they'll some day find that they're suddenly irrelevant. By the way, during the 2012 London Olympics the IOC and Google struck a deal to stream the like 20+ HD channels live to 64 territories: "The live-streaming on the IOC’s YouTube channel will provide exclusive digital access to the London 2012 Olympic Games in territories where digital broadcast rights have not already been acquired by the IOC’s broadcast partners" https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-to-live-stream-london-2012-in-64-territories-on-its-youtube-channel https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-to-live-stream-london-2012-... https://youtube.googleblog.com/2012/06/ioc-to-show-live-coverage-of-london.html https://youtube.googleblog.com/2012/06/ioc-to-show-live-cove... I was in one of those regions at the time. It was awesome.
  - rhizome 10y ago
    I think the IOC might be shooting themselves in both of their feet here They might get a piece of the vig kicked back to them, but by the time the games started the IOC already had their payday.
- bdhess 10y ago
  I dunno, I found video of Usain Bolt's 2016 100m in less than a minute of looking around on nbcolympics.com. Though I'd have to imagine that that content is geofiltered, since AFAIK NBC only has streaming rights within the US. NBC paid the IOC something absurd like $12B for exclusive US media rights for the games through 2032. Territorial broadcast rights agreements are a huge source of funding for the IOC. It's hard to imagine how they'd maintain these revenue streams if they abandoned the exclusivity aspect of their media agreements, which likely implies that the games would suffer in some way.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
    If NBC were hosting a fireworks show they'd make the people that didn't pay stay indoors. Edit: Perhaps the strategy isn't effective, that's all.
  - Retric 10y ago
    I completely skipped watching the Olympics in large part because of NBC which is terrible. So, I have some doubt that 12B is optimal for the IOC and it clearly sucks for the rest of US.
    - xur17 10y ago
      I did the same. I tried to find a live stream online, and failed. Everything I tried wanted me to login with cable credentials. Ended up watching it on my broadcast TV for about 10 minutes before giving up, and didn't watch anymore.
      - js2 10y ago
        Too late now, but you could have purchased a Playstation Vue subscription for one month ($30, one week free trial) which would have given you full access to the NBC Sports app and nbcolympics.com. You can sign up on the web and don't need a Playstation. That's what I did since I don't have a TV subscription and it worked well. The NBC iOS and tvOS app was pretty awful in forcing ads, but the Roku app let you skip mostly skip through them, which is how I did most of my watching.
- wnevets 10y ago
  >Unfortunately, it is easier for me to find 20 year old simpsons clips on youtube than it is for me to find a video of Bolt's 100m heat from last week. So glad I wasn't the only one. For whatever reason the nbc link to the video was never on the front of google.
  - cylinder 10y ago
    This was maddening as well. I had to go through nbcsports app and dig deep to find "Michael Phelps wins gold after thrilling final!" Instead of "200m X stroke final"
    - tmptmp 10y ago
      Such apps are menace. It seems that these apps cannot even do anything better than simple string search. They should learn a thing: Let Google do the search for them not their app. A joke for the people who know little bit of programming: Hope they are not using strcmp to find the video file with title "Michael Phelps wins gold after thrilling final!" :( edit: a typo
      - seanp2k2 10y ago
        Probably untuned MySQL full text search, possibly Solr with all the default settings looking only at titles.
  - LanceH 10y ago
    The ads streamed just fine. None of the actual events streamed after the ads finished.
    - nsxwolf 10y ago
      Perverse that ads always work. I feel like I'm owed some kind of monetary compensation every time I watch an ad and then don't get to see the video I wanted to watch.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  I cannot stand NBC and their selfish Olympic coverage.
- edpichler 10y ago
  Meanwhile, CBC of Canada broadcasted all olympic games for free. They had peak of 27 simultaneous channels transmitting competitions with excellent quality. Anyone with a Canadian IP could watch, I personally used a VPN because I don't have TV cable here in Brazil.
  - mrb 10y ago
    So did the BBC. They broadcasted for free multiple channels of Olympic events to any and all British IP addresses. I also used a VPN because I don't have cable TV. I have no idea why Olympics events are not freely broadcasted in the US.
    - caidh 10y ago
      Because the US does not have well funded public television as the UK (the BBC) or Canada (the CBC) do. In the US, sadly, it is to the highest bidder that the broadcast & streaming rights go to. NBC paid $1.23 Billion for rights to the 2016 Summer Olympics, an astronomical amount. They only provided streaming to those with cable packages above what is considered 'basic'.
      - grokavi 10y ago
        hotstar.com broadcasted Olympics free of cost in India. They aren't public funded.
        Fuzzwah 10y ago
        Channel 7 here in Australia broadcast on 3 channels for free (with ads). They also offered free streaming on mobile devices for a range of sports and had a $20 deal for complete access to all content. That said, they really annoyed me with the way they handled the time difference. They would open their prime time coverage with spoilers of all the previous day's events and then tell you which replays you could watch on the other channels later....
        10y ago
- _rpd 10y ago
  On the other hand, it did motivate me to find a way to stream NBC Sports. Something I wouldn't have done otherwise.
- rakoo 10y ago
  > As a lover of capitalism this all leaves me conflicted. I don't want to go on a tangent but this is the exact contrary of Capitalism, it's a monopoly: as a consumer I can't make a choice, there is no market.
  - jaredklewis 10y ago
    I feel the word monopoly gets way overused. "There is only one company with a train from Town A to Town B! It's a monopoly!" Probably not, as if there are other viable ways to travel (car, bus, plane, boat), then there are substitutes. The olympics are no different. As a form of entertainment, there are countless substitutes. If the Olympics are boring, people won't watch. Even as a form of international cooperation, there are many substitutes that compete with the Olympics for the time, money, and attention of nations. There is a market.
    - ppereira 10y ago
      Just like public utilities don't have a monopoly on the provision of power, because, hey, every home-owner can buy a diesel generator. With the level of substitution you are describing, you've made the word monopoly meaningless. The regional broadcasters for the Olympics have a monopoly because of their economic power in setting the price for their good. Other than circumventing copyright or using a VPN, there is no competitor that will provide you with the Olympics for less money. Random youtube videos are not a substitute for watching an Olympics broadcast live.
      - jamra 10y ago
        Public utilities are regulated, which require them to make their case in front of a judge for price changes.
      - rahimnathwani 10y ago
        For many routes, planes/trains/coaches are substitutes, so it's meaningful to say that trains are not monopolies. How do we know? Because when train tickets go up in price, there's a measurable effect on the number of coach tickets bought. Your example (household electricity vs. diesel generators) doesn't work in the same way. If domestic electricity prices in London were to go up by 25℅, the number of diesel generators and amount of diesel fuel sold would not budge. Because diesel isn't a reasonable substitute. If anyone wants to know more, search the internet for 'cross elasticity of demand' and 'definition of substitute'.
- robbiep 10y ago
  >'The olympics represent one of the only instances of global unity through competition left in the world.' What were the other ones that have presumably ceased to exist?
  - mattkrause 10y ago
    The World Cup is also probably pretty close too. Maybe Eurovision also (for Europeans under about 35, perhaps).
- X86BSD 10y ago
  And for the Olympics, the ancient games meant to bring people together, I for one couldn't watch 5 minutes of any of it as I am a chord cutter and couldn't stream jack, legally that is. No one should have a monopoly on the Olympics. I find that rather sad and telling.
- akerro 10y ago
  London 2012: He said: "You probably wouldn't be walking in with a Pepsi T-shirt because Coca Cola are our sponsors." Interviewer Evan Davis asked Lord Coe if he would be able to enter the Olympic Park wearing Nike trainers, to which Lord Coe replied: "Let's put some reality in this. You probably would be able to walk through with Nike trainers." Lord Coe defended the ban on 'objects or clothing bearing political statements or overt commercial identification' outlined in official guidelines for spectators. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9414178/London-2012-Olympics-You-can-wear-Nike-trainers-but-leave-the-Pepsi-T-shirt-at-home-says-Lord-Coe.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9414178/Londo...
tmcpro 10y ago
Would be about $93k worth of bandwidth from AWS Sao Paulo Region (about 3x more than AWS US-East)
- johansch 10y ago
  So maybe $9k in actual costs then.
- aws_person 10y ago
  My deepest sympathies for someone who needs bulk, reliable networking out of sa-east-1.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
antisthenes 10y ago
I'd be much more interested to see how much data was transferred during streaming The International 6.
- r1ch 10y ago
  According to my data, the TI6 English stream had 16M viewer hours. Unfortunately I don't know the breakdown of what bitrate everyone was watching at, but assuming a mix of 50% Source quality and 50% High quality, that would equate to about 25,145 TB if my math is correct.
ejcx 10y ago
Curious how many Tb someone like twitch does per day. AFAIK they are the biggest live streaming platform, since Netflix is all HTTP. Seems like that could be a big moneymaker for them, for these big time events that need a "live" aspect.
- zbobet2012 10y ago
  Twitch and Netflix use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming. So does youtube. It's all the same tech.
- johansch 10y ago
  > since Netflix is all HTTP You're saying you can't stream over HTTP?
  - niftich 10y ago
    Not OP, but the distinction is between live streams where the content is being generated very close to the consumption time (historically delivered using RTSP) and between static files sitting on a server/CDN (ie. Netflix, Youtube, etc.)
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - ejcx 10y ago
      This is exactly the distinction I'm talking about. Doing it live is way harder than moving static content out to all the leaf nodes once per day and serving it to a geographically small region. Adaptive bitrate has nothing to do with the point I'm making that, AFAIK, twitch has the most "live" eyeballs out of anyone and there are special engineering challenges there.
      - zbobet2012 10y ago
        Well, no Twitch isn't the largest. NBC/Comcast moved several orders of magnitude more of live video for the last olympics, and those numbers went up substantially this year+. Live presents interesting challenges yes, but in some ways it is easier than VOD from a scale perspective. In live all users are watching essentially the same content++, so it is nearly perfectly cacheable in memory. That means you don't really need a ton of cache, just a cdn with lots NIC's, ram, and CPUs. You can use mid-tier caches to "fan" out data to edge caches and progressively deload origins. You can take a look at our architecture over here https://www.bizety.com/2015/07/15/deep-dive-comcast-cdn-architecture/ https://www.bizety.com/2015/07/15/deep-dive-comcast-cdn-arch.... The really hard problems with live are actually the surrounding items. If you are placing personalized ads, and 100 million people are watching a stream, your system must support 100million transactions per second. If you have QOS data from clients, you need to support 100 million TPS. Etc, etc. Building live packagers and segmenters is also a serious bit of work. Especially to "broadcast" standards. This requires the coordination of multiple video streams subject to byzantine failure. I guess the hardest scale problem though is probably emergency alerts. In this situation all users will tune at almost precisely the same time to a live streaming event. 30million + users can arrive on a single (previously cold) item in < 100ms. Just opening that many tcp sockets is serious work even for large numbers of servers. + (sauces so I don't get in trouble, full disclosure I designed and work on the systems that do this): http://nbcsportsgrouppressbox.com/2012/08/14/ondon-olympics-on-nbc-is-most-watched-television-event-in-u-s-history/ http://nbcsportsgrouppressbox.com/2012/08/14/ondon-olympics-... http://www.fiercecable.com/special-report/judges-tally-nbc-scores-historic-online-video-numbers-at-sochi-olympics-but-will-it http://www.fiercecable.com/special-report/judges-tally-nbc-s... ++ http://www.cs.umd.edu/~slee/pubs/iptv-sigmet09.pdf http://www.cs.umd.edu/~slee/pubs/iptv-sigmet09.pdf
user5994461 10y ago
Let's say that an average video is 500MB nowadays. Be it a show, a short movie, a long HD music video on youtube, or a sport event on the olympics. Let's say that 1000 thousand people are watching the Olympic games. 500 GB * 1000 people = That's 500 GB of traffic. Let's convert GB to Gb (multiply by 8) and we're talking 400 Tb. So.. The title of this article means there are about 1000 people who watched ONLY one event of the olympics and then put off their TV. Well, I thought Olympics were a big worldwide event... I was wrong. --- Alternative: We can take it the other way around and say that there were 1000 sport events during the Olympic, and one guy to watch them all :D Just for Fun: I'd love to see the numbers from Dailymotion.com, see how much the Olympic Games are unpopular in comparison.
- imperialdrive 10y ago
  agreed, this really isn't that much bandwidth
  - zbobet2012 10y ago
    2.0Mbps is an SD profile, which is worth mentioning.
- hltbra 10y ago
  s/500 GB * 1000 people/500 MB * 1000 people/
- persane 10y ago
  You missed/added a times 1000 somewhere in your math.
- C00der 10y ago
  500GB * 8bit = 4Tb; not 400Tb
- kakarot 10y ago
  Keep in mind that ISPs and large streaming services each take steps to reduce the bandwidth of streaming media via different compression methods. The average video that you download in high quality may be around 500MB, but if you were to stream the same video on Netflix in a good area you would probably only consume 100-400MB of bandwidth.
jordanbaucke 10y ago
I'm interested in learning what the average "delay" for live-streaming would be? At a high-level RTMP > (Segmenter: EvoStream) HLS > Cassandra < NginX-LUA < HTTP Request (seems to flow model outlined here (From the 2014 World Cup): https://www.nginx.com/blog/globo-coms-live-video-platform-fifa-world-cup-14-part-ii-microservices/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/globo-coms-live-video-platform-fi...) I'd assume it's minimum > 20 seconds depending on setup and teardown time for first "chunk" in a sequence to reach cache and be transferred to a user?
- zbobet2012 10y ago
  TL;DR: The delay is normally a segment length. Somewhere between 2-16s depending on there configs. Because the system is realtime (live) it _must_ not fall behind live. These systems therefore are always only a single segment behind live. (A segment is an independently decodable chunk of video, usually between 2 and 16s). Source: I designed the backends, including segmenting, for NBC.
  - jordanbaucke 10y ago
    @zbobet2012 makes sense, certainly, you can shrink the chunk-size down to 2 seconds, I wonder if it's not practical to do though wouldn't the practicality of setting up a setup > teardown of a new HTTP connection, fetching the next chunk, etc. cause inconsistency in completing this procedure by the time a 2 second chunk has played out. I believe people have used WebSockets to push these segments? Since once you have established one TCP socket connection you don't have to setup a new "session" for each discrete segment?
    - r1ch 10y ago
      HTTP keepalives prevent the excessive connection requests. The main issue with HLS distribution is TCP sucks over high latency links, so you have to have edges near your users.
      - jordanbaucke 10y ago
mmagin 10y ago
Too bad multicast streaming never really happened.
- zbobet2012 10y ago
  How do you think digital cable television works today? It happens, just on closed private networks.
  - superuser2 10y ago
    Is digital cable television using IP? I thought it would be something proprietary.
    - zbobet2012 10y ago
      IP to the edge (of a CMTS) and then it's flipped to QAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulatio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem_termination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem_termination_system Also systems like AT&T uverse (fiber to the home) use IP multicast.
eva1984 10y ago
Didn't seem too big to me..It is like 32Tb/4TB per day. What is the number of Twitch's daily traffic, I'd say it is comparable.
ilaksh 10y ago
If its 455 TB of source video then you need around 91 5TB hard drives to store that. Although they probably have a cheaper tape storage or something. If you wanted to buy that many on Amazon you can get external 5 tb now for $109. So that would cost about $9900. Which to me is a pretty small number considering.
- Animats 10y ago
  No, it's 455TB streamed out to all watchers, total, at an average bitrate of 2.0 Mbps. Far less unique content.
ryanlol 10y ago
Wow, that's not very much at all. In comparison, I've been using a bit over 600TB with a budget of less than $500/month. With double the budget I could easily transfer olympic amounts of data! Really puts to perspective how incredibly accessible bandwidth pricing is these days.
- truth_sentinell 10y ago
  Do you have a insert a dumb celebrity fan page? Or what do you do to consume that bandwidth?
  - ryanlol 10y ago
    Scanning. See for example: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan
visarga 10y ago
I don't watch TV so I didn't see any of it. Was it free to stream?
tempodox 10y ago
And then, nobody can watch because the IOC files a copyright complaint.
paulasmuth 10y ago
None of these numbers add up. If 30 million hours were watched with an average bandwidth of 2Mbps, the total data volume should be 25,749TB (or close to 26PB) and not 400TB. Also, if the peak bandwidth was 600Gpbs, that peak could not have lasted very long. With that much bandwidth the claimed 400TB of total transferred data would be used up in roughly 90 minutes. So either the total data transferred or the number of hours watched figure is off by a factor of at least 60x. [ I figured "400Tb" was supposed to mean 400 terrabytes. If it's actually 400 terrabits, the numbers are off by one magnitude more ]
oskarpearson 10y ago
Note that there's a mismatch between the listed title and the content of the article. The article refers to "400Pb (400000Tb)", not "455Tb". This may be why there's such confusion about the numbers in the comments.

147 points by dreampeppers99 10y ago

> Globo.com only had rights for streaming the content to Brazil... with peak of 433K simultaneous users This is a neat writeup but the bigger point here is highlighted by the opening statements. While i get the massive revenue channel the olympics provides, i can't help but feel that the media stranglehold over the events has gone too far. The olympics represent one of the only instances of global unity through competition left in the world. Much the same way the world cup brings small and proud nations into the global stage, the olympics has the same power. Unfortunately, it is easier for me to find 20 year old simpsons clips on youtube than it is for me to find a video of Bolt's 100m heat from last week. Who benefits from this apart from NBC? I can list approx. 7.4B people who don't. As a lover of capitalism this all leaves me conflicted. But i would point to the olympic coverage as the instance of corporations going too far with their constricting of media sharing.

johansch 10y ago
I feel the same. I've been travelling during the past month. Accessing video content from the Olympics has been extremely hard. I think the IOC might be shooting themselves in both of their feet here. If they don't open open up, they'll some day find that they're suddenly irrelevant. By the way, during the 2012 London Olympics the IOC and Google struck a deal to stream the like 20+ HD channels live to 64 territories: "The live-streaming on the IOC’s YouTube channel will provide exclusive digital access to the London 2012 Olympic Games in territories where digital broadcast rights have not already been acquired by the IOC’s broadcast partners" https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-to-live-stream-london-2012-in-64-territories-on-its-youtube-channel https://www.olympic.org/news/ioc-to-live-stream-london-2012-... https://youtube.googleblog.com/2012/06/ioc-to-show-live-coverage-of-london.html https://youtube.googleblog.com/2012/06/ioc-to-show-live-cove... I was in one of those regions at the time. It was awesome.
- rhizome 10y ago
  I think the IOC might be shooting themselves in both of their feet here They might get a piece of the vig kicked back to them, but by the time the games started the IOC already had their payday.
bdhess 10y ago
I dunno, I found video of Usain Bolt's 2016 100m in less than a minute of looking around on nbcolympics.com. Though I'd have to imagine that that content is geofiltered, since AFAIK NBC only has streaming rights within the US. NBC paid the IOC something absurd like $12B for exclusive US media rights for the games through 2032. Territorial broadcast rights agreements are a huge source of funding for the IOC. It's hard to imagine how they'd maintain these revenue streams if they abandoned the exclusivity aspect of their media agreements, which likely implies that the games would suffer in some way.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago
  If NBC were hosting a fireworks show they'd make the people that didn't pay stay indoors. Edit: Perhaps the strategy isn't effective, that's all.
- Retric 10y ago
  I completely skipped watching the Olympics in large part because of NBC which is terrible. So, I have some doubt that 12B is optimal for the IOC and it clearly sucks for the rest of US.
  - xur17 10y ago
    I did the same. I tried to find a live stream online, and failed. Everything I tried wanted me to login with cable credentials. Ended up watching it on my broadcast TV for about 10 minutes before giving up, and didn't watch anymore.
    - js2 10y ago
      Too late now, but you could have purchased a Playstation Vue subscription for one month ($30, one week free trial) which would have given you full access to the NBC Sports app and nbcolympics.com. You can sign up on the web and don't need a Playstation. That's what I did since I don't have a TV subscription and it worked well. The NBC iOS and tvOS app was pretty awful in forcing ads, but the Roku app let you skip mostly skip through them, which is how I did most of my watching.
wnevets 10y ago
>Unfortunately, it is easier for me to find 20 year old simpsons clips on youtube than it is for me to find a video of Bolt's 100m heat from last week. So glad I wasn't the only one. For whatever reason the nbc link to the video was never on the front of google.
- cylinder 10y ago
  This was maddening as well. I had to go through nbcsports app and dig deep to find "Michael Phelps wins gold after thrilling final!" Instead of "200m X stroke final"
  - tmptmp 10y ago
    Such apps are menace. It seems that these apps cannot even do anything better than simple string search. They should learn a thing: Let Google do the search for them not their app. A joke for the people who know little bit of programming: Hope they are not using strcmp to find the video file with title "Michael Phelps wins gold after thrilling final!" :( edit: a typo
    - seanp2k2 10y ago
      Probably untuned MySQL full text search, possibly Solr with all the default settings looking only at titles.
- LanceH 10y ago
  The ads streamed just fine. None of the actual events streamed after the ads finished.
  - nsxwolf 10y ago
    Perverse that ads always work. I feel like I'm owed some kind of monetary compensation every time I watch an ad and then don't get to see the video I wanted to watch.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
I cannot stand NBC and their selfish Olympic coverage.
edpichler 10y ago
Meanwhile, CBC of Canada broadcasted all olympic games for free. They had peak of 27 simultaneous channels transmitting competitions with excellent quality. Anyone with a Canadian IP could watch, I personally used a VPN because I don't have TV cable here in Brazil.
- mrb 10y ago
  So did the BBC. They broadcasted for free multiple channels of Olympic events to any and all British IP addresses. I also used a VPN because I don't have cable TV. I have no idea why Olympics events are not freely broadcasted in the US.
  - caidh 10y ago
    Because the US does not have well funded public television as the UK (the BBC) or Canada (the CBC) do. In the US, sadly, it is to the highest bidder that the broadcast & streaming rights go to. NBC paid $1.23 Billion for rights to the 2016 Summer Olympics, an astronomical amount. They only provided streaming to those with cable packages above what is considered 'basic'.
    - grokavi 10y ago
      hotstar.com broadcasted Olympics free of cost in India. They aren't public funded.
      - Fuzzwah 10y ago
        Channel 7 here in Australia broadcast on 3 channels for free (with ads). They also offered free streaming on mobile devices for a range of sports and had a $20 deal for complete access to all content. That said, they really annoyed me with the way they handled the time difference. They would open their prime time coverage with spoilers of all the previous day's events and then tell you which replays you could watch on the other channels later....
        10y ago
_rpd 10y ago
On the other hand, it did motivate me to find a way to stream NBC Sports. Something I wouldn't have done otherwise.
rakoo 10y ago
> As a lover of capitalism this all leaves me conflicted. I don't want to go on a tangent but this is the exact contrary of Capitalism, it's a monopoly: as a consumer I can't make a choice, there is no market.
- jaredklewis 10y ago
  I feel the word monopoly gets way overused. "There is only one company with a train from Town A to Town B! It's a monopoly!" Probably not, as if there are other viable ways to travel (car, bus, plane, boat), then there are substitutes. The olympics are no different. As a form of entertainment, there are countless substitutes. If the Olympics are boring, people won't watch. Even as a form of international cooperation, there are many substitutes that compete with the Olympics for the time, money, and attention of nations. There is a market.
  - ppereira 10y ago
    Just like public utilities don't have a monopoly on the provision of power, because, hey, every home-owner can buy a diesel generator. With the level of substitution you are describing, you've made the word monopoly meaningless. The regional broadcasters for the Olympics have a monopoly because of their economic power in setting the price for their good. Other than circumventing copyright or using a VPN, there is no competitor that will provide you with the Olympics for less money. Random youtube videos are not a substitute for watching an Olympics broadcast live.
    - jamra 10y ago
      Public utilities are regulated, which require them to make their case in front of a judge for price changes.
    - rahimnathwani 10y ago
      For many routes, planes/trains/coaches are substitutes, so it's meaningful to say that trains are not monopolies. How do we know? Because when train tickets go up in price, there's a measurable effect on the number of coach tickets bought. Your example (household electricity vs. diesel generators) doesn't work in the same way. If domestic electricity prices in London were to go up by 25℅, the number of diesel generators and amount of diesel fuel sold would not budge. Because diesel isn't a reasonable substitute. If anyone wants to know more, search the internet for 'cross elasticity of demand' and 'definition of substitute'.
robbiep 10y ago
>'The olympics represent one of the only instances of global unity through competition left in the world.' What were the other ones that have presumably ceased to exist?
- mattkrause 10y ago
  The World Cup is also probably pretty close too. Maybe Eurovision also (for Europeans under about 35, perhaps).
X86BSD 10y ago
And for the Olympics, the ancient games meant to bring people together, I for one couldn't watch 5 minutes of any of it as I am a chord cutter and couldn't stream jack, legally that is. No one should have a monopoly on the Olympics. I find that rather sad and telling.
akerro 10y ago
London 2012: He said: "You probably wouldn't be walking in with a Pepsi T-shirt because Coca Cola are our sponsors." Interviewer Evan Davis asked Lord Coe if he would be able to enter the Olympic Park wearing Nike trainers, to which Lord Coe replied: "Let's put some reality in this. You probably would be able to walk through with Nike trainers." Lord Coe defended the ban on 'objects or clothing bearing political statements or overt commercial identification' outlined in official guidelines for spectators. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9414178/London-2012-Olympics-You-can-wear-Nike-trainers-but-leave-the-Pepsi-T-shirt-at-home-says-Lord-Coe.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/olympics/news/9414178/Londo...

tmcpro 10y ago

Would be about $93k worth of bandwidth from AWS Sao Paulo Region (about 3x more than AWS US-East)

johansch 10y ago
So maybe $9k in actual costs then.
aws_person 10y ago
My deepest sympathies for someone who needs bulk, reliable networking out of sa-east-1.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

antisthenes 10y ago

I'd be much more interested to see how much data was transferred during streaming The International 6.

r1ch 10y ago
According to my data, the TI6 English stream had 16M viewer hours. Unfortunately I don't know the breakdown of what bitrate everyone was watching at, but assuming a mix of 50% Source quality and 50% High quality, that would equate to about 25,145 TB if my math is correct.

ejcx 10y ago

Curious how many Tb someone like twitch does per day. AFAIK they are the biggest live streaming platform, since Netflix is all HTTP. Seems like that could be a big moneymaker for them, for these big time events that need a "live" aspect.

zbobet2012 10y ago
Twitch and Netflix use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_bitrate_streaming. So does youtube. It's all the same tech.
johansch 10y ago
> since Netflix is all HTTP You're saying you can't stream over HTTP?
- niftich 10y ago
  Not OP, but the distinction is between live streams where the content is being generated very close to the consumption time (historically delivered using RTSP) and between static files sitting on a server/CDN (ie. Netflix, Youtube, etc.)
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - ejcx 10y ago
    This is exactly the distinction I'm talking about. Doing it live is way harder than moving static content out to all the leaf nodes once per day and serving it to a geographically small region. Adaptive bitrate has nothing to do with the point I'm making that, AFAIK, twitch has the most "live" eyeballs out of anyone and there are special engineering challenges there.
    - zbobet2012 10y ago
      Well, no Twitch isn't the largest. NBC/Comcast moved several orders of magnitude more of live video for the last olympics, and those numbers went up substantially this year+. Live presents interesting challenges yes, but in some ways it is easier than VOD from a scale perspective. In live all users are watching essentially the same content++, so it is nearly perfectly cacheable in memory. That means you don't really need a ton of cache, just a cdn with lots NIC's, ram, and CPUs. You can use mid-tier caches to "fan" out data to edge caches and progressively deload origins. You can take a look at our architecture over here https://www.bizety.com/2015/07/15/deep-dive-comcast-cdn-architecture/ https://www.bizety.com/2015/07/15/deep-dive-comcast-cdn-arch.... The really hard problems with live are actually the surrounding items. If you are placing personalized ads, and 100 million people are watching a stream, your system must support 100million transactions per second. If you have QOS data from clients, you need to support 100 million TPS. Etc, etc. Building live packagers and segmenters is also a serious bit of work. Especially to "broadcast" standards. This requires the coordination of multiple video streams subject to byzantine failure. I guess the hardest scale problem though is probably emergency alerts. In this situation all users will tune at almost precisely the same time to a live streaming event. 30million + users can arrive on a single (previously cold) item in < 100ms. Just opening that many tcp sockets is serious work even for large numbers of servers. + (sauces so I don't get in trouble, full disclosure I designed and work on the systems that do this): http://nbcsportsgrouppressbox.com/2012/08/14/ondon-olympics-on-nbc-is-most-watched-television-event-in-u-s-history/ http://nbcsportsgrouppressbox.com/2012/08/14/ondon-olympics-... http://www.fiercecable.com/special-report/judges-tally-nbc-scores-historic-online-video-numbers-at-sochi-olympics-but-will-it http://www.fiercecable.com/special-report/judges-tally-nbc-s... ++ http://www.cs.umd.edu/~slee/pubs/iptv-sigmet09.pdf http://www.cs.umd.edu/~slee/pubs/iptv-sigmet09.pdf

user5994461 10y ago

Let's say that an average video is 500MB nowadays. Be it a show, a short movie, a long HD music video on youtube, or a sport event on the olympics. Let's say that 1000 thousand people are watching the Olympic games. 500 GB * 1000 people = That's 500 GB of traffic. Let's convert GB to Gb (multiply by 8) and we're talking 400 Tb. So.. The title of this article means there are about 1000 people who watched ONLY one event of the olympics and then put off their TV. Well, I thought Olympics were a big worldwide event... I was wrong. --- Alternative: We can take it the other way around and say that there were 1000 sport events during the Olympic, and one guy to watch them all :D Just for Fun: I'd love to see the numbers from Dailymotion.com, see how much the Olympic Games are unpopular in comparison.

imperialdrive 10y ago
agreed, this really isn't that much bandwidth
- zbobet2012 10y ago
  2.0Mbps is an SD profile, which is worth mentioning.
hltbra 10y ago
s/500 GB * 1000 people/500 MB * 1000 people/
persane 10y ago
You missed/added a times 1000 somewhere in your math.
C00der 10y ago
500GB * 8bit = 4Tb; not 400Tb
kakarot 10y ago
Keep in mind that ISPs and large streaming services each take steps to reduce the bandwidth of streaming media via different compression methods. The average video that you download in high quality may be around 500MB, but if you were to stream the same video on Netflix in a good area you would probably only consume 100-400MB of bandwidth.

jordanbaucke 10y ago

I'm interested in learning what the average "delay" for live-streaming would be? At a high-level RTMP > (Segmenter: EvoStream) HLS > Cassandra < NginX-LUA < HTTP Request (seems to flow model outlined here (From the 2014 World Cup): https://www.nginx.com/blog/globo-coms-live-video-platform-fifa-world-cup-14-part-ii-microservices/ https://www.nginx.com/blog/globo-coms-live-video-platform-fi...) I'd assume it's minimum > 20 seconds depending on setup and teardown time for first "chunk" in a sequence to reach cache and be transferred to a user?

zbobet2012 10y ago
TL;DR: The delay is normally a segment length. Somewhere between 2-16s depending on there configs. Because the system is realtime (live) it _must_ not fall behind live. These systems therefore are always only a single segment behind live. (A segment is an independently decodable chunk of video, usually between 2 and 16s). Source: I designed the backends, including segmenting, for NBC.
- jordanbaucke 10y ago
  @zbobet2012 makes sense, certainly, you can shrink the chunk-size down to 2 seconds, I wonder if it's not practical to do though wouldn't the practicality of setting up a setup > teardown of a new HTTP connection, fetching the next chunk, etc. cause inconsistency in completing this procedure by the time a 2 second chunk has played out. I believe people have used WebSockets to push these segments? Since once you have established one TCP socket connection you don't have to setup a new "session" for each discrete segment?
  - r1ch 10y ago
    HTTP keepalives prevent the excessive connection requests. The main issue with HLS distribution is TCP sucks over high latency links, so you have to have edges near your users.
    - jordanbaucke 10y ago

mmagin 10y ago

Too bad multicast streaming never really happened.

zbobet2012 10y ago
How do you think digital cable television works today? It happens, just on closed private networks.
- superuser2 10y ago
  Is digital cable television using IP? I thought it would be something proprietary.
  - zbobet2012 10y ago
    IP to the edge (of a CMTS) and then it's flipped to QAM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadrature_amplitude_modulatio... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem_termination_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cable_modem_termination_system Also systems like AT&T uverse (fiber to the home) use IP multicast.

eva1984 10y ago

Didn't seem too big to me..It is like 32Tb/4TB per day. What is the number of Twitch's daily traffic, I'd say it is comparable.

ilaksh 10y ago

If its 455 TB of source video then you need around 91 5TB hard drives to store that. Although they probably have a cheaper tape storage or something. If you wanted to buy that many on Amazon you can get external 5 tb now for $109. So that would cost about $9900. Which to me is a pretty small number considering.

Animats 10y ago
No, it's 455TB streamed out to all watchers, total, at an average bitrate of 2.0 Mbps. Far less unique content.

ryanlol 10y ago

Wow, that's not very much at all. In comparison, I've been using a bit over 600TB with a budget of less than $500/month. With double the budget I could easily transfer olympic amounts of data! Really puts to perspective how incredibly accessible bandwidth pricing is these days.

truth_sentinell 10y ago
Do you have a insert a dumb celebrity fan page? Or what do you do to consume that bandwidth?
- ryanlol 10y ago
  Scanning. See for example: https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan https://github.com/robertdavidgraham/masscan

visarga 10y ago

I don't watch TV so I didn't see any of it. Was it free to stream?

tempodox 10y ago

And then, nobody can watch because the IOC files a copyright complaint.

paulasmuth 10y ago

None of these numbers add up. If 30 million hours were watched with an average bandwidth of 2Mbps, the total data volume should be 25,749TB (or close to 26PB) and not 400TB. Also, if the peak bandwidth was 600Gpbs, that peak could not have lasted very long. With that much bandwidth the claimed 400TB of total transferred data would be used up in roughly 90 minutes. So either the total data transferred or the number of hours watched figure is off by a factor of at least 60x. [ I figured "400Tb" was supposed to mean 400 terrabytes. If it's actually 400 terrabits, the numbers are off by one magnitude more ]

oskarpearson 10y ago

Note that there's a mismatch between the listed title and the content of the article. The article refers to "400Pb (400000Tb)", not "455Tb". This may be why there's such confusion about the numbers in the comments.