Re: Webcasting as a replacement for traditional broadcasting (was Re: Wackie 'ol Friday)

[Michael McConnell <michael () winkstreaming com>]

On Jun 7, 2013, at 9:53 AM, Jay Ashworth <jra () baylink com> wrote:

> ----- Original Message -----
> > From: "Michael Painter" <tvhawaii () shaka com>
>
> > Anyone besides jra remember the last Super Bowl?
> > Better this year? Worse?
> > I'm sure whomever is listening in would like to know as well.
> >
> > http://www.multichannel.com/blogs/translation-please/multicast-unicast-and-super-bowl-problem
>
> Well, in fact, the most recent Massive Failure was the webcast of the 
> Concert For Boston, on 5/31.  They were using a vendor called LiveAlliance.tv,
> who did not appear to be farming it out to Limelight or Akamai or Youtube, a..
> far as I could tell, and they apparently only figured for a scale 5 audience,
> and then got more than 500k attempts.

Such a common story. ..

> They got rescued by a vendor named Fast Hockey who are an amateur hockey
> webcast aggregator, I gather, and *are* an Akamai client.
>
> My estimation is that the reason that webcasting will never completely
> replace broadcasting is that -- because it is mostly unicast -- its
> inherent complexity factor is a) orders of magnitude higher than bcast, and
> b) *proportional to the number of viewers*.  Like Linux, that doesn't scale.

This is the primary reason companies including Internap, Peer1 and XO (The list goes on and on, and includes several 
company that only provide CDN services) all used to run their own CDN networks and now all three have outsourced this 
CDN service / sold their customers to Limelight. Edgecast even sold off all their services in Asia and just runs a US 
based CDN.

The general policy in data centres has been 30 - 40% utilisation to allow for bursting and unexpected temporary 
increases, in CDN its more like 5 - 10% especially when you are a CDN for hire you really can't make any predictions 
about what your customers might do. Its common for CDN's to have entire rack's sitting powered off that only need to be 
powered up to join the cluster, our company has multiple full racks per data centre just a alert to the NOC staff or 
email away from being turned on.

> And broadcasters are not prone to think of the world in a view where you
> have to provide technical support to people just to watch your show.
>
> "He's at the 40... the 30... the 20... this is gonna be the Super Bowl, 
> folks... the 10... [buffering]"
>
> Cheers,
> -- jra
> -- 
> Jay R. Ashworth                  Baylink                       jra () baylink com
> Designer                     The Things I Think                       RFC 2100
> Ashworth & Associates     http://baylink.pitas.com         2000 Land Rover DII
> St Petersburg FL USA               #natog                      +1 727 647 1274


--

Michael McConnell
WINK Streaming;
email: michael () winkstreaming com
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