Yesterday was supposed to be the day that live Web video streaming took on TV broadcasting. CNN.com alone served a record 21.3 million streams, with a peak of 1.3 million simultaneous streams. And Akamai reported a peak of 5.4 million simultaneous visitors per minute to the various news sites for which it hosts video, and more than 7 million simultaneous streams.
With millions tuning in from their PCs to watch President Obama’s Inauguration speech, it was one of the biggest tests yet for live video streaming. But live streaming failed. CNN.com kept bumping viewers into virtual waiting rooms. This happened to me in the middle of Obama’s speech. I had to keep hitting refresh, but missed half the speech. The stream on Hulu was even worse, with the video frozen and the audio coming in and out. And forget about Ustream. I couldn’t even get any audio. This seemed to be the general experience out there, based on other reports.
When it comes to big live events with millions of people watching at the same time, traditional TV broadcasters have nothing to worry about. Right now, the Internet breaks at about one million simultaneous streams. That is nothing when it comes to the audience size for historic events, or even a big football game. The Internet simply does not shine when it is used as a broadcast medium. And yesterday proved it.
Will it get better? Yes. Akamai and others can always put up more proxy streaming servers at the edge of the network to meet demand. But that is an expensive proposition for infrequent events. Perhaps a better solution for live streaming is a peer-to-peer model where streaming quality improves as more people watch. (Check out RayV, which does this). That would require everyone to download extra add-on software for their browsers. I’d do it in a second if that would solve the live stream stuttering problem.
The live stream on the BBC website worked perfectly. The Joost stream also worked well.
Live Web Video Streaming didn’t fail. CNN and Akami did.
Same here – BBC was fine right through.
Streaming still has a long long way to go before it rivals traditional tv though. If i hadn’t been at work, i’d have watched it on tv.
Sorry BBC site was poor for me – spent the whole time playing catch up. maybe it’s actuallt the final few metres where it falls down.
TV has the upper hand at the moment with premium bandwidth fit for purpose and no need for significant network planning.
Well I was watching it on FreeTube ( http://www.freetube.us.tc ), it worked for me and I was able to switch through a few channels covering it when they went ads.
No British channel was covering it except for BBC but it didn’t help that they were cutting out every now and then and showing more of the reporters and the crowd then the parade and Obama. So I used free tube site to watch the old Yank channels like CNN and ABC.
Overall pretty good but his speech was a disappointment. Still America finally can be proud you picked the better candidate and social progress and all that. All it took was 43 presidents, and 232 years of White rule and 8 years of foreign relations driven to extremes to bring about change.
Actually I used CNN and Facebook: it took sometime to start but then it worken perfectly.
My experience mixing live event and live comments with my circle of friends is one of the things to remember on the Net.
I wish I could get a stream of what’s going on in Gaza since Israel blocks all Western press. Looks like Israel is throwing some pseudo-sanctions into the mix.
http://www.reut...0090121?sp=true
Not nearly as fun, but, have you tried reading the text of it? If you just wanted to know what was said, that would be a good way as well.
Anyways, if you really want it, you can post some random topic on my website, and I can post it there.
I dont believe in government censorship.
You could just WATCH TELEVISION like a normal person. Then you wouldn’t have any problems. Unless you have Charter cable. Then you would have big problems.
Times are changing, technology is progressing, and the means of communication are going through a revolution. If everyone followed your view, our society wouldn’t move forward and technology wouldn’t advance. This is the future, we need to embrace it and encourage its evolution.
Some people get headaches from the low refresh rate of televisions, and prefer the much higher quality computer monitor…
Just comparing.
Also, many people may have had internet service provider issues. Not only was the server overloaded, but, your individual ISP’s connection to that server may also be overloading…
ISP’s themselves can often be bottlenecks, and not due to the upload/download speeds.
An example:
If your like me, and have a server in your house, when you download large files directly over your local connection on your router at about 10 connections each 600KBPS, the rest of your house goes slow. Now, this isnt because your trying to access that same server, its because the entirety of the router is being used for ten connections on one IP address, preventing the other computers from being able to connect at their regular speed, whatever that may be… thats the best I can word that idea.
The Joost stream- would not even load. finished files but nothing live.
Agreed. Hulu also worked w/o a hitch. CNN and Akami dropped the ball on this one.
Gee, I wonder what CDN Hulu uses, oh Akamai that’s right. So it is Akamai’s fault? Or did CNN just get so much traffic it overwhelmed the Akamai network in particular regions?
yea but hulu locked out anyone not from america.
Watched on bbc but hulu sucked!
http://thecashc...am.blogspot.com
Why doesn’t anyone mention Ustream?
I streamed it all the way from Singapore. It worked like a charm!
BestJobsOnline
http://tinyurl.com/7uj5ay
http://WWW.change.gov also worked perfectly.
The BBC stream did not work. It kept kicking me out and saying to come back later.
We tried watching CNN stream in office and like you mentioned it kept freezing.
Solution? We turned on TV in one of our conference rooms and enjoyed nice, quality Direct TV signal.
As far as web streaming goes, no one can beat Akamai.
Akamai – yea it looks good to the viewer but have you seen the bill- they cost way too much for long term live streaming
Agreed, Akamai’s price for an event this size would be extremely high.
The author suggests that a P2P model would be a better fit for an event such as yesterdays. He has the right idea because a P2P model can lower price, increase scalability and optimize networks.
But why is he only advocating RayV and no other P2P providers such as Octoshape, Abacast, RawFlow or DigiMeld?
Ustream was perfect!
Only complaint was all the Obama haters in the chat!!
Obama w00t! Adios Bush!
You get what you pay for
As for Ustream, it was good but I don’t think they had anywhere near the amount of people watching it as let’s say CNN.
Jim, I am guessing the author did not list them because he has not seen a real success full test he can verify works (remember bluefalcon?). I mean verify as in how much bandwidth are they saving. There are only one or (maybe) two successful live streaming p2p’s on the market and you did not name either of them….. feel free to keep looking
Have a read about RTMFP:
http://en.wikip...a_Flow_Protocol
I’m more interested in the browser having built-in BitTorrent capabilities. See here: http://ajaxian....-in-the-browser
Video streaming isn’t going to replace tv. How many people can you get huddled around your PC to watch the Super Bowl on a 21 inch monitor as opposed to a room full of people watching it on a 50″ hdtv.
People may watch historic events at work and use video streaming then but it won’t compare to tv broadcasts.
TV: 1, Video Streaming: 0
Video streaming isn’t going to replace tv. How many people can you get huddled around your PC to watch the Super Bowl on a 21 inch monitor as opposed to a room full of people watching it on a 50″ hdtv.
That makes about as much sense as posting in 1994 “who is going to buy anything on this non-secure internet where you can’t even touch the product”
lol. That was funny and correct.
Ya. Pffft! Internet! It’ll pass with time, eh, Sandra?
What if it’s just you watching? Also, consider international viewing, where you can have millions of channels at your disposal online, but possibly only a few on your TV. Case in point, I had to watch a rugby game streamed on justin.tv because it wasn’t being broadcast where I lived.
My company opened the training rooms and projected the stream for us. We had about 100+ people watching 2 projectors. I don’t think that equates to people huddled around my laptop. Plus if you have the same 100 people trying to watch it on our 50″ conference room TV it would have been a nightmare. We don’t have a TV input into our projectors because generally we aren’t interacting with that content; however, all of our projectors in the various conference rooms do have a laptop hookup which we use to watch videos all the time both held locally and remotely.
Streaming will relace TV {seesmic_video:{”url_thumbnail”:{”value”:”http://t.seesmic.com/thumbnail/778CWsc08k_th1.jpg”}”title”:{”value”:”Streaming will relace TV ”}”videoUri”:{”value”:”http://www.seesmic.com/video/QehOEeDTkQ”}}}
Speaking as a person who has his laptop hooked up to a tv screen, you can hook up your laptop to a tv screen.
Hey Sandra?! Thanks for reversing the evolution of mankind about an inch. We love you. Now, if you don’t mind we’ll all just be carrying on here in the year 2009. Appreciate it.
Sandra? Please, send me a photo. I need to update Wikipedia. And yes, you can huddle around my little 28″ desktop monitor while I update the meaning of “stupid”. LMAO!!!
Had problems viewing it on CNN.com, MSNBC.com, and ABCNews.com. All these sights either froze or put me into the virtual waiting room. Resorted to an audio stream from local radio station. I missed about 25% of the speech.
I watched via UStream.tv on my PC with no problems at all.
I watched it on ustream from Irelandwith no issues what so ever.
Ustream did not work for me at all, never loaded
I watched USstream on a Mac from Slovakia, no problem, best stream from all of ‘em.
I watched USstream on a Mac from Slovakia, no problem, best stream from all of ‘em.
I watched on Ustream (computer, not iPhone), and not only was it smooth, but it was actually a split second ahead of my television.
Should have watched it on MSNBC. It was great except for like 5 minutes where it froze here and there. . .that was all though.
CNN.com didn’t fail once on me mean while joost and abcnews.com that we were streaming in other rooms did.
The silverlight streaming on the official inauguration worked great. Why no mention of that?
I started off watching it on MSNBC.com, which started having problems at some point, switched over to pic2009.org and it worked fine.
Same, but went straight to the Pres. Inauguration Committee website. It worked perfectly for a small school with nine rooms and projectors in each. The only stuttering present was due to the small amount of bandwidth provided by the IT department at the district.
iStreamPlanet (http://www.istreamplanet.com) managed the webcast process for the Presidential Inauguration Committee with Microsoft using Silverlight, FWIW. iStreamPlanet chose the features, integrated the player on the pic2009.org site, digitized the video onsite and off satellites, and ultimately delivered the feed. We had a half dozen people watching the feed in our office, and were grateful to see the event without hiccups.
Like Ramzi did, I decided to use Sky News HD stream and it worked flawlessly. Even being in Chicago hitting the stream I saw everything, heard everything and watched up to the point when Bush left in Marine One. I knew CNN’s feed was going downhill…thank god for Twitter as someone who I follow in England pointed me to Sky News.
MSNBC had it on their site and it stuttered quite a bit (brief pauses while it tried to catch up with demand I’m guessing), but I didn’t miss any of the speech. Could have been a lot smoother. Now I’m glad I didn’t hop over to CNN.com though.
The Silverlight stream from pic2009 worked beautifully.
It is nonsense to suggest the video player had anything to do with the availability of the video stream.
I imagine the unpopularity of Silverlight helped its feeds resulting in lighter load.
My cnn.com stream worked perfectly all day long.
ABCNews.com – no fail, all day. Occassional spinning arrow during non-essential parts of the day (Feinstein describing the crystal bowls… meh).
I watched it on the offical site and it looked great and never stuttered. *cough* Silverlight *cough*
Watched it on BBC, perfect!
CNN/Facebook worked great for me – and we had two computers in the house (Mac & PC) streaming at the same time. The Comcast cable version on our TV junked out bigtime on us (well, the signal in general has been in the toilet the past few weeks). I have been reading reports of interrupted streams like you talk about, but it seems to be regional. I would love to see how the ISPs in the backend handled it or if any hops/nodes were the culprit.
I just watched in on tv like most people.
That worked perfectly for me. No cut, no freeze. I was also able to comment the live via the facebook application with no problem.
I disagree, I watched the whole thing on Hulu with only a few moments of jerky video and the audio was fine.
It was really my first time using Hulu and I liked the “pop-out” window feature where you can float the viewer in the corner of your screen and continue working.
Or, we can all switch to IPv6 and use multicast.
That said, ustream video froze from time to time for me (here in europe), but audio was ok
At least 1 other person suggested moving to IPV6. I thought TechCrunch was full of AOLers for a minute…
nytimes.com – live stream – no fail.
UStream on the iPhone worked pretty well from Czech, although it did lose the connection a couple of times. But overall I ws pretty impressed.
I saw the oath ceremony and following address on CNN, it was perfect. I am in Europe.
Maybe your considering your own experience as the demonstration of the failure of live Web video streaming was a little too hasty. A market research on the future of live web streaming done on… 1 interview.
Consider apologizing.
This may be a case of the squeaky wheel getting the grease. I watched it on the iPhone Ustream.tv app and TV. Apart from the delay and a few jitters I had a seamless experience. Honestly as an overall event I would say this was a success.
Besides Douglas Adams says “technology is a word that describes something that doesn’t work yet.”
I couldn’t agree more! In fact I wrote a post on my site about my experience with the streaming of yesterday’s event… check it out @ henrysztul.info
the CNN stream / facebook integration using Octoshape’s P2P technology seemed to work wonders. But I only tuned in late to that, hence can’t comment on whether it worked well during peak time (speech for example). R.
I hate that octoshape plugin, but I’m on a Mac…maybe its better on PC
Tried to watch it on pic2009 (with moonlight on linux) and it froze right before Obama was sworn in. Jumped around between CNN, Hulu, msnbc… couldn’t get a feed that didn’t freeze.. Eventually got in on CNN for the last 2/3rds of Obama’s speach…
I watched the actually ceremony on Hulu with no issues. I then switched to CNN for the parade, really liked there multiple camera choices.
+1 for having a great office internet connection
We streamed the inauguration for our employees using from foxnews using their adobe air software.
Worked perfectly.
Couple things here. First, would people please stop saying “it worked fine for me” because it’s really annoying and it doesn’t prove anything. I suspect it worked fine for most people but for some it didn’t. Providers obviously had limits set where they just cut people off and the big graphic that Erick put in his post makes that point quite vividly so you aren’t disproving anything by saying your stream worked fine.
Second, on the point of p2p being an alternative, I doubt we’ll see that. It’s not a bad idea but this bandwidth problem is an “interim issue” in that we all know that (a) bandwidth will get faster and faster while (b) streaming will get more and more efficient. That is just technology marching on. So I find it unlikely that we’ll see solutions built around an edge case where everyone knows the problem will eventually work itself out.
@Tom
Totally Agree. Joost failed because downloading a plugin is a pain in the ass (if it works)
The only one who could do p2p effectively is flash…if they do it
Actually, Flash have P2P in their sights. Go read up about RTMFP
http://en.wikip...a_Flow_Protocol
With fall-back to Flash media servers were the p2p connection fails.
Actually, while on CNN.com, it prompted me to install the Octoshape plug in somewhere in the course of streaming. This is a P2P plugin, and the streaming was fine throughout the broadcast. I suspect, P2P was used where there was enough user density to allow it. The only downside was that the CNN.com stream was lagging 1 minute behind the TV broadcast (probably as a result of P2P). Fox was 2-3 seconds behnd TV broadcast and ABC.com about 10 seconds behind.
Just a note:
iPhone streaming of the inauguration ALSO failed!!
When Apple iPhone users went to use the “YouTube” application on the iphone, inauguration video was absolutely NOWHERE to be found. Not in the “Featured” videos. Not in the “Latest” videos (even at 1:00 PM!), and not in the “Hottest” videos. Not even a search produced any relevant results.
Incredibly, instead of the inauguration, YouTube’s “Latest Videos” iPhone channel just contained PORN and other garbage.
What a total embarrassment the YouTube iPhone app is!
YouTube doesn’t have live streams, what you talkin ’bout…
I watched the CNN/Facebook stream for at least 5 hours without a hiccup yesterday. I thought it was fantastic. The activity from friends on Facebook was a nice addition to a really quality stream. Heck look at it at full screen size: http://www.twitpic.com/155hd
I’m surprised to read that others didn’t have the same experience.
Isn’t one of President Obama’s big projects broadband infrastructure so that Internet access is considered more of a utility rather than a service? I’m sure that having so many more broadband customers, once that project is done, will encourage providers to consider other solutions. I like the peer-to-peer idea…
We were streaming Joost here at the office and it worked just fine. Great picture as well.
Agreed. I watched it, or at least tried to, via BBC. Loads of down time.
Multicasting would have made broadcasting events like this easy.
It’s a pitty our network providers don’t support it fully.
Sure the streaming worked for many people but you all missed the point – streaming FAILS when you have a LARGE simultaneous audience. I don’t even know if even P2P streaming could handle large events like this or a superbowl with 40-50 whatever millions of users.
The problem of large scale simultaneous streaming isn’t really be addressed either because there are just not that many events of that size that warrant the investment and interim alternatives like edge servers are cheaper. Unfortunately the promise of multicast just never materialized.
Not for me. I watched the entire ceremony on SkyNews (from the UK). It never glitched up and the resolution was at least twice that of the CNN and Hulu streams (comparable between a YouTube video and a DVD).
I don’t know about the others but I had CNN and ustream open and ustream worked great while cnn had lag and eventually dropped.
Ustream was great.
Ustream worked perfect for me. Watched all day..
I don’t think Ustream is p2p, correct?
I watched it on CNN/Facebook and it was flawless the entire time from about 11:30am ET – 2:00pm ET.
Just because a lot of people have a crappy connection doesn’t mean the stream failed.
Joost used to run a p2p client and techcrunch reported that failed.
http://www.tech...ives-up-on-p2p/
Techcrunch now runs webclients like youtube etc.
Don’t forget the load on the infrastructure.
Performance on any web-related resource went to “hell in a handbasket” from an hour before the inauguration to about two hours afterward.
Cybergridlock.
The point is not that some solutions worked for some of the readers here- the point is that most solutions did not work for everyone and these various solutions are not even close to 100% (or TV). And that is the probleming. Meaning almost all of them need WORK!
Ustream worked fine for me in Central London… I would’ve tried BBC’s live stream first if I had actually found the link!
I think it worked pretty well. Of course TV is better. It’s been around for 50+ years. I would hope after that long it would work.
Live video streaming has been around for what- a couple of years? Of course there will be some hiccups, but I think overall it didn’t fail, it succeeded.
I wasn’t around back when TV became available, but I imagine it wasn’t “perfect” like it is now. Remember rabbit ears – how long did you have to play with those to get the signal just right, and even then it was probably a bit fuzzy, and most likely worse then what some people experienced yesterday.
Come on Erick, give the technology a chance to mature.
not just video.. even whitehouse.gov it took 20mins (after the oath) for the front page to show up
Maybe Joost should get back to their roots and build up their p2p technology. Still can’t believe they gave up on that idea and jumped on the flash bandwagon.
I watched on Hulu with perfect audio and minimal video hangs.
Me too. Had Hulu and CNN open. CNN was choppy and laggy. Closed it, stuck with Hulu, and had no problems.
I watched on Hulu in London, UK and I had no problem either. Audio was fine and video was good enough.