
The Day Live Web Video Streaming Failed Us - pclark
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/21/the-day-live-web-video-streaming-failed-us/
======
bjplink
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
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
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
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.

------
AndrewWarner
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
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.

------
llimllib
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-...](http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/04/the-ala-carting-of-video-on-the-
net-will-it-lead-to-disaster/)
[http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20vide...](http://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&q=economics%20video%20site%3Ablogmaverick.com)

~~~
tptacek
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
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/>

[2]: [http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs-
digital...](http://blogmaverick.com/2008/03/28/internet-video-vs-digital-tv/)

[3]: [http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-
internet-...](http://blogmaverick.com/2008/07/14/the-way-to-save-internet-
video/)

------
jreposa
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.

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

------
bprater
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?

~~~
iigs
There are some pretty interesting innovations coming down from deep packet
inspection providers. In one case they're caching the data that users are
serving via bittorrent and re-serving it to the second and future persons
requesting it, basically giving users credit for sharing without saturating
their upstreams and causing network problems.

It wouldn't surprise me if these products can do the same thing for downstream
traffic as well.

Everything old is new again, it's like the 1990s proxy servers brought into
the 2000s-2010s.

~~~
tptacek
In this case, the "old" stuff you're talking about never really got "old".
There's fundamentally not much of a difference between a proxy server and an
edge overlay network fed with traffic redirection; in both cases, you're
getting content from a middlebox.

~~~
iigs
Sure, conceptually. I didn't know of any big ISPs using proxies in the last
5-7 years, though, until the Comcast DPI fiasco happened.

I could well be out of the loop and not aware of any huge Squid or comparable
installations, but I believed them to be archaic until recently because of how
much faster commercial/service provider type WAN interfaces (DS-x, OC-x) were
growing relative to consumer interfaces (DSL, cable). Of course FTTH (large
bandwidth to each node) and wireless data (shared upstream + carrier
optimizations for signal quality instead of bandwidth + physics) may turn this
on it's head.

