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The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us

15 points by pclark 18y ago

prakash 18y ago
More here: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/01/akamai-limelight-and-highwinds-deliver-over-8-million-simultaneous-streams.html http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...
bjplink 18y ago
This story is exactly why TechCrunch is such a joke. You can't make giant, sweeping statements like: "The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us" and then, in the second sentence of your story, deliver a bunch of incredibly impressive stats about how successful the various streams were. I like how the last paragraph reveals the true point of this post though. It's just a veiled advertisement for another lame P2P video service. How does anyone take these people seriously? It's kind of fun to watch them flop around making mountains out of mole hills but anyone who considers these jokers to be a legitimate news source should re-think how they get their information.
- dcurtis 18y ago
  But it did fail. For those 21 million people, the video stopped or it kicked them out or there were audio problems. I am not sure why the article plugged some obscure video streaming software. CNN.com already does peer to peer video transferring via a flash plugin that it forces you to download.
  - bjplink 18y ago
    I haven't seen anything that says all 21 million people had problems. All I see is another sensationalistic headline from TechCrunch. There is a plug at the end because that's how blogs make money; by selling links and paid mentions.
    - tptacek 18y ago
      They probably didn't make it up. I watched on Hulu and it had real problems for me, too. And CNN was impossible. It's possible most Internet users have never even heard of Hulu, and they were the best case.
- biohacker42 18y ago
  Floping around making mountains out of mole hills is what gets attention, from short attention span crowds. Is is just me or has the HN crowd's attention span noticeably shortened, since the recent big bump of visitors pg reported?
- brandnewlow 18y ago
  I tend to agree. TechCrunch writes what it needs to for the pageview numbers they need to hit. The best part is that this story is syndicated onto the Washington Post's tech page. That version of it is now one of the top stories on Google News. Out of all the stories being published today, this particular one has been deemed one of the most important on the internet, due to Arrington being such a smooth operator.
jreposa 18y ago
The NYTimes website held up great. I'm on an old school T1 connection and I only experienced a few pauses. Also, a bunch of people were in the conference room watching it on a TV and at some points I could hear my stream was actually broadcasting ahead of the TV.
AndrewWarner 18y ago
The big challenge for online video is staying up in a crisis. I remember on 9/11 the web failed and most of us resorted to TV & radio.
- yellowbkpk 18y ago
  Interesting that both of those mediums are broadcast/multicast only, not unicast. All of these video streams (with maybe the exception of CNN's P2P plugin) are unicast, TCP/IP data streams. To really survive a crisis, ISPs need to implement real multicast data streams correctly so that one server can broadcast the video feed without requiring all of the clients to have their own individual copy of the feed going out. Edit: Sorry, looks like this is already being discussed down thread.
bprater 18y ago
Is the only general solution to this problem: 'more edge servers'? Or is there another technology that could be really helpful for this type of event?
- wmf 18y ago
  Multicast.
  - prakash 18y ago
    you think so? can you explain more? I am not looking at the theory of it, rather interested in working models where multicast is being used to deliver online content.
    - johns 18y ago
      http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071221_003697.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071221_0036...
      - tptacek 18y ago
        Akamai --- or, more likely, Comcast and AT&T --- could accomplish the same thing without detonating your routing tables, just by adding servers and indirecting content with a traffic manager. Cringely is nuts.
    - wmf 18y ago
      Multicast does not work on the Internet today. But it could work if ISPs invested some effort.
      - prakash 18y ago
        what incentives are preventing the ISP's from investing effort?
        18y ago
llimllib 18y ago
How many times must Mark Cuban say that the economics of content delivery on the internet are fucked, before people listen? http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/04/the-ala-carting-of-video-on-the-net-will-it-lead-to-disaster/ http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/04/the-ala-carting-of-video-... http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20video%20site%3Ablogmaverick.com http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20vide...
- tptacek 18y ago
  The bulk of Cuban's point here is simply that online video currently has a lower ad load (2 minutes) than network TV (8 minutes), which is a huge reduction in volume. But it doesn't acknowledge that those 2 minutes: * can be targeted much better than existing TV ads * have a drastically lower cost of entry for advertisers, and can potentially support a much larger ecosystem of advertisers * support fine-grained stats and analytics about viewership and popularity, rather than TV's archaic system of up-fronts, sweeps weeks, and Nielsons. It seems likely that Internet video is going to seriously fuck up the existing networks. But the question is whether it's going to be creative destruction. There are lots of credible models that don't require middlemen to sell us air.
  - llimllib 18y ago
    That's all true for the article I linked directly, but the problems are greater than just the lower ad load. The value of a la carte viewers is lower than the value of scheduled viewers[1] and more importantly, the internet is not designed to assure successful video delivery[2]. He even proposes a mechanism[3] for fixing the economics of video distribution - by intermediating the cable companies(!), for whom a marginal viewer has no cost, between content providers and customers. I'm truly not a Cuban fanboy, but I think he's got a point on this one. [1]: http://blogmaverick.com/2007/07/09/metcalfes-law-and-video/ http://blogmaverick.com/2007/07/09/metcalfes-law-and-video/ [2]: http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs-digital-tv/ http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs-digital... [3]: http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-internet-video/ http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-internet-...

15 points by pclark 18y ago

More here: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/01/akamai-limelight-and-highwinds-deliver-over-8-million-simultaneous-streams.html http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...

bjplink 18y ago

This story is exactly why TechCrunch is such a joke. You can't make giant, sweeping statements like: "The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us" and then, in the second sentence of your story, deliver a bunch of incredibly impressive stats about how successful the various streams were. I like how the last paragraph reveals the true point of this post though. It's just a veiled advertisement for another lame P2P video service. How does anyone take these people seriously? It's kind of fun to watch them flop around making mountains out of mole hills but anyone who considers these jokers to be a legitimate news source should re-think how they get their information.

dcurtis 18y ago
But it did fail. For those 21 million people, the video stopped or it kicked them out or there were audio problems. I am not sure why the article plugged some obscure video streaming software. CNN.com already does peer to peer video transferring via a flash plugin that it forces you to download.
- bjplink 18y ago
  I haven't seen anything that says all 21 million people had problems. All I see is another sensationalistic headline from TechCrunch. There is a plug at the end because that's how blogs make money; by selling links and paid mentions.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    They probably didn't make it up. I watched on Hulu and it had real problems for me, too. And CNN was impossible. It's possible most Internet users have never even heard of Hulu, and they were the best case.
biohacker42 18y ago
Floping around making mountains out of mole hills is what gets attention, from short attention span crowds. Is is just me or has the HN crowd's attention span noticeably shortened, since the recent big bump of visitors pg reported?
brandnewlow 18y ago
I tend to agree. TechCrunch writes what it needs to for the pageview numbers they need to hit. The best part is that this story is syndicated onto the Washington Post's tech page. That version of it is now one of the top stories on Google News. Out of all the stories being published today, this particular one has been deemed one of the most important on the internet, due to Arrington being such a smooth operator.

jreposa 18y ago

The NYTimes website held up great. I'm on an old school T1 connection and I only experienced a few pauses. Also, a bunch of people were in the conference room watching it on a TV and at some points I could hear my stream was actually broadcasting ahead of the TV.

AndrewWarner 18y ago

The big challenge for online video is staying up in a crisis. I remember on 9/11 the web failed and most of us resorted to TV & radio.

yellowbkpk 18y ago
Interesting that both of those mediums are broadcast/multicast only, not unicast. All of these video streams (with maybe the exception of CNN's P2P plugin) are unicast, TCP/IP data streams. To really survive a crisis, ISPs need to implement real multicast data streams correctly so that one server can broadcast the video feed without requiring all of the clients to have their own individual copy of the feed going out. Edit: Sorry, looks like this is already being discussed down thread.

bprater 18y ago

Is the only general solution to this problem: 'more edge servers'? Or is there another technology that could be really helpful for this type of event?

wmf 18y ago
Multicast.
- prakash 18y ago
  you think so? can you explain more? I am not looking at the theory of it, rather interested in working models where multicast is being used to deliver online content.
  - johns 18y ago
    http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071221_003697.html http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20071221_0036...
    - tptacek 18y ago
      Akamai --- or, more likely, Comcast and AT&T --- could accomplish the same thing without detonating your routing tables, just by adding servers and indirecting content with a traffic manager. Cringely is nuts.
  - wmf 18y ago
    Multicast does not work on the Internet today. But it could work if ISPs invested some effort.
    - prakash 18y ago
      what incentives are preventing the ISP's from investing effort?
      - 18y ago

llimllib 18y ago

How many times must Mark Cuban say that the economics of content delivery on the internet are fucked, before people listen? http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/04/the-ala-carting-of-video-on-the-net-will-it-lead-to-disaster/ http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/04/the-ala-carting-of-video-... http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20video%20site%3Ablogmaverick.com http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20vide...

tptacek 18y ago
The bulk of Cuban's point here is simply that online video currently has a lower ad load (2 minutes) than network TV (8 minutes), which is a huge reduction in volume. But it doesn't acknowledge that those 2 minutes: * can be targeted much better than existing TV ads * have a drastically lower cost of entry for advertisers, and can potentially support a much larger ecosystem of advertisers * support fine-grained stats and analytics about viewership and popularity, rather than TV's archaic system of up-fronts, sweeps weeks, and Nielsons. It seems likely that Internet video is going to seriously fuck up the existing networks. But the question is whether it's going to be creative destruction. There are lots of credible models that don't require middlemen to sell us air.
- llimllib 18y ago
  That's all true for the article I linked directly, but the problems are greater than just the lower ad load. The value of a la carte viewers is lower than the value of scheduled viewers[1] and more importantly, the internet is not designed to assure successful video delivery[2]. He even proposes a mechanism[3] for fixing the economics of video distribution - by intermediating the cable companies(!), for whom a marginal viewer has no cost, between content providers and customers. I'm truly not a Cuban fanboy, but I think he's got a point on this one. [1]: http://blogmaverick.com/2007/07/09/metcalfes-law-and-video/ http://blogmaverick.com/2007/07/09/metcalfes-law-and-video/ [2]: http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs-digital-tv/ http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs-digital... [3]: http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-internet-video/ http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-internet-...