While we’ve talked quite a bit about what impact the Olympics may have on an enterprise network’s performance, we haven’t talked much about the performance of the NBC site hosting the live streaming of the Olympics.
According to Jason Perlow at ZDNet, Limelight networks (which hosts the streaming videos) deployed the videos by going to the public internet by hosting the content more locally – at the ISP. That means you’re viewing the Olympics through your ISP’s internal network, and the broader internet doesn’t even enter into the connection.
This is smart thinking, it appears to be working, and by all measures this should be applauded. Perhaps even duplicated – if you know that multiple employees will download the same content, local hosting on the LAN is preferable to duplicate download streams tying up the more expensive, slower WAN lines.
From the enterprise end of the equation, the fact that Limelight is delivering Olympics video more effectively just means that IT managers cannot count on their servers going down from being unable to handle the demand – IT managers still need to monitor their own networks for performance problems when a big event like the Olympics come up.
However, it would be wrong to assume that Limelight’s strategy is the only reason why Olympic live-streaming hasn’t slowed to a trickle.
First of all, the site blocks 95.44% of visitors from accessing the content – because it limits the content only to those in the United States. That’s a lot of people.
Secondly, the site requires Microsoft Silverlight. Most people don’t have Silverlight installed. Some can’t even install it on their systems. And there are certainly going to be a quite a few people who just didn’t think installing Silverlight was worth the bother to watch five minutes of Olympic footage they may be mildly interested in.
And finally – none of the really popular sports are being streamed. Gymnastics, Women’s Beach Volleyball, Swimming (with the exception of synchronized) and most of the track and field events aren’t available live. So you’re left with judo, fencing, and the decathlon.
So while it is a true technological wonder that the lights have stayed on and the site performs admirably – it is important to recognize that Limelight has not found a magic bullet to deal with extremely high internet video demand.
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