BBC Delivered 2.8PB On Busiest Olympics Day, Reaching 700Gb/s As Wiggo Won Gold 96
Qedward writes "The BBC has revealed that on the busiest day of its London 2012 Olympics coverage it delivered 2.8 petabytes worth of content, peaking when Bradley Wiggins won gold, where it shifted 700Gb/s. It has also said that over a 24-hour period on the busiest Olympic days it had more traffic to bbc.co.uk than it did for the entire BBC coverage of the FIFA World Cup 2010 games. They revealed they had 106 million requests for BBC Olympic video content, which included 12 million requests for video on mobile devices across the whole of the Games. Mobile saw the most uptake at around 6pm when people had left the office but still wanted to keep informed of the latest action. Tablet usage, however, reached a peak at around 9pm, where people were using it as a second screen or as they continued to watch the games in bed."
Torrent stream? (Score:3)
This seems like an excellent use of torrent streaming. Even if the average feed was a few minutes behind it should be an improvement in data distribution.
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Pretty sure they used a CDN or two to handle the traffic, and its possible the CDN uses a hybrid mode which works basically like combining a regular CDN server network with a p2p torrent network
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It could be built into the Flash video player, theoretically.
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Can flash open listening ports?
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Pretty sure they used a CDN or two to handle the traffic, and its possible the CDN uses a hybrid mode which works basically like combining a regular CDN server network with a p2p torrent network
Can you expand on what you mean by this, not many users have CDN client software installed to facilitate P2P..
I think he's talking about something like this:
http://www.akamai.com/client/ [akamai.com]
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Ew.
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Pretty sure they used a CDN or two to handle the traffic, and its possible the CDN uses a hybrid mode which works basically like combining a regular CDN server network with a p2p torrent network
Can you expand on what you mean by this, not many users have CDN client software installed to facilitate P2P..
Yea, when you go to the URL instead of getting routed to the BBC site, your ISP kicks your request to a server they have on their network, and you are actually streaming the video from that server. The BBC and the CDN provider handle the relay between the main BBC server and the remote CDN node servers.
As for this whole "hybrid mode" and p2p streaming, I'm not aware of anybody who provides such a service, but it would be possible in theory. Not saying there aren't such services, I just have not personally s
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No one wants to get the result late though.
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Maybe - but define late... there's late in that everyone else knows the result and you might find out before you get to watch it. And then there's late, in that you are few seconds behind everyone else.
Re:Torrent stream? -- No (Score:2)
While using data forwarding within the CDN would probably be a win it doesn't work well for this sort of application where you need both high quality and fast distribution to the end clients.
The problem is the client's upstream speed. Most end client systems are ADSL or configured as if they are in that the upstream bandwidth is a tenth or less of the downstream. Bittorrent works kind of like a (safe, self building) "bucket brigade" line where the seeder passes the data to the first client and it passes
Re:Torrent stream? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, you're browsing the internet and watching the streaming video, as many people do. You inadvertantly find out the result of the 100 meters on facebook/twitter minutes before the race even starts on your video.
No, people won't accept minutes of delay for "live" events. A few seconds, yes, so long as one isn't betting on the event. But a few seconds is useless for torrent type distribution.
Unable to geoblock it (Score:2)
This seems like an excellent use of torrent streaming.
I doubt they would go for that since it would be hard to block it based on geographic location. One day the IOC might stop being so amazing hypocritical and practice what they preach ("bringing the world together through sport") by letting each nation's coverage be available worldwide instead of requiring divisive national firewalls...but given the money they make from it it seems doubtful. What was really annoying though was that, after wrestling through a CTV nightmare website of Silverlight a lot of the
A fraction of what it could have been (Score:4, Interesting)
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That's down to the broadcaster in your country. Fail to see why other broadcasters could not have done the same.
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Re:A fraction of what it could have been (Score:5, Informative)
In the U.S. NBC has carried the excluive contract from 1992 through 2020. Apparently the International Olympic Committee likes them. The company paid $1.18 billion for the exclusive U.S. television rights, and they sold $1.3 billion in advertising, so that's a profit (versus 2006/10 when they lost 0.2 billion each). Here are NBC's stats:
- 32 million viewers during Primetime broadcast/reruns (highest level since the 1976 Olympics)
- 73% of Americans followed on television. 17% online. 12% on social media sites.
- "London's 219.4 million total viewers (you were a viewer if you watched at least six minutes) made NBC's Games the most-watched TV event ever, breaking Beijing's record of 215 million viewers."
- NBC's digital stats after Week 1 of the Olympics (so the total pull is probably double)
â34 Million Live Streams, Up 333% vs. Beijing
â744 Million Page Views, Up 160 Million from Beijing
â6.2 Million Devices Verified by Cable, Satellite and Telco Customers
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I dropped Cable this year, and NBC broadcast is the only network I can't get with antenna. Even with a nice HTPC TV setup, I didn't watch any Olympics as the only time I tried, the content was crap. It streamed OK for the 15 minutes I looked at it though. Adblock took care of the ads, so all I saw during commercials was this. http://i.imgur.com/n9o95.jpg [imgur.com]
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The company paid $1.18 billion for the exclusive U.S. television rights, and they sold $1.3 billion in advertising, so that's a profit
Only if they had less then $0.12 billion in other expenses...
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There are some things missing from here, sadly, and US customers should demand these next time:
- live streaming coverage of every sport (if the UK can have it then why can't the US?)
- live coverage of the opening and closing ceremonies UNCUT
Rio is a friendlier time zone so it should be easier. Let's see what happens.
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NBC tape-delayed the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, which is on Pacific Time. Not sure if it was for the entire USA, but the West Coast definitely got a TD'ed opening ceremonies.
I was watching the closing ceremonies live in Canada, could even choose between over half a dozen stations (several English and French which covered different sports during the actual Games, and even got one with Chinese and Mandarin narrators). I switched to an NBC affiliate during a commercial break and it was showing a volleyball final
Re:A fraction of what it could have been (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd have to say the coverage by the beeb was excellent and well worth the fee, and I'm not a sports fan!
Re:A fraction of what it could have been (Score:5, Informative)
though I don't see why it couldn't be offered as a paid service to offset our licence fee.
Trouble is in a lot of cases the BBC can't legally do that either because they bought UK only rights to the content in question from the content owners or for content they created themselves they have sold exclusive country specific rights to foreign broadcasters.
So any subscription based iPlayer for foreigners would end up with only a fraction of the content the UK iPlayer gets.
Also afaict the BBC gets traffic to most UK ISPs virtually free due to peering agreements whereas for foreigners they would have to pay transit fees. The prices for foreigners would have to be high enough to reflect this.
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You - for subject definitions of "you" - can peer with them at AMS-IX and DE-CIX as well.
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This is the reason, I think, why they let F1 go almost wholesale to Sky. Right decision. And the streaming held up very well.
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Right decision for who? Certainly not the British public. Uninterrupted free broadcast from the BBC vs huge subscriptions from Sky.
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We still get F1 on the radio, although it is not the same.
Had they not saved money then we'd be faced with worse Olympics coverage, simply. And as those are a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get it right.
Re:A fraction of what it could have been (Score:5, Interesting)
Don't forget about the 24 *extra* HD channels that the BBC put on just for the Olympics. Was able to drop into any one of the Olympic events at any time through the red button, or just by navigating to the correct channel on my Freesat box. It really did blow my mind. Above all - no ads! The TV license is normally pretty good value for money, but the Olympic coverage was a cut above. Really feel for those that had to endure NBC.
Re:A fraction of what it could have been (Score:5, Informative)
Re:A fraction of what it could have been (Score:4, Informative)
BBC also transmitted in 3D.
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The problem with what you say is that NBCs coverage was profit driven. They tape-delayed shows to ensure prime-time audiences, cut large elements out of the opening/closing ceremonies and most events were not free to watch online without a cable subscription.
Whilst the BBC and the Television License is a subject of debate in the UK, it's very narrow-minded to say the $230 USD (not $300) brings only dramas. Comedy, news, current affairs, radio, light entertainment, online streaming, education and a whole loa
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It's not one channel. For that $230 a year, there are 10 TV channels, 10 national radio stations (and around 50 local ones), plus the website (including the comprehensive news and sport sections, equal to any daily newspaper). They're also in charge of certain public services, such as televising parliament sessions (BBC Parliament is one of the channels- no commercial station would broadcast wall-to-wall parliamentary debate, so it is a unique service).
Excluding the print and local stuff, at about $2.30 per
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They are a strange, almost vanishingly small minority of people who nobody pays much attention to, even if they do like to jump up and down and write angry letters to the Daily Mail and love letters to that nice Mr. Murdoch. Nobody cares about them, and rightly so.
You don't pay for Doctor Who (Score:1)
Doctor Who is commercially viable on its own, as it is one of the 5 top power brands which between them bring in £300million in sales to the BBC
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So maybe stop complaining about television and how much television costs to other countries, and just stop watching it. It does suck a lot. But your responses are downvoted for a reason. They sounds very whiney.
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And when I said "dramas" I was being inclusive of the sitcoms and all the other primetime entertainment. BBC does produce some good shows. Like Doctor Who and..... well that's all I've got (that's currently airing).
Top Gear. It's only the most-watched regular TV show on the planet, with a regular viewership more than the entire US population.
Not that it's a drama, but since you're arguing against a fee that pays for more than just drama shows, it is a valid example of another good BBC-produced TV show.
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P.S.
And of course BBC coverage was excellent..... it was in the same time zone. NBC coverage was excellent too when the Olympics were on the same continent as NBC's audience. They showed 1996 Atlanta, 2002 Salt Lake, and 2010 Vancouver olympics live (not tape delayed). How good did the BBC cover these events? I doubt they showed them live (6pm to 8am) since the British people would have been asleep for huge chunks of the events. The network would have aired some live sports, and some taped.
Re:A fraction of what it could have been (Score:4, Informative)
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Did it roll out 24 extra HD channels? Does it air the segments live, back-to-back and without commercials?
Regarding your question about live coverage, the answer is yes -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/olympic_games/vancouver_2010/8468322.stm [bbc.co.uk]
And they had daily recap programs for those that missed the live coverage.
Why is it so hard for some people to accept that you can have a high quality public service run by a public organisation without a profit motive? Is it so hard to see beyond the dogma?
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Might want to re-check the Vancouver Olympic coverage.
Lots of complaints online about NBC's coverage there, particularly from west-coasters suffering from tape-delay of events (especially the opening ceremonies) happening in their own time zone.
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NBC and NBColympics.com costs me $0.00 (as do all the other FreeToAir channels)
Fallacy.
True they don't cost you directly but you still pay indirectly.
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The end customer pays for everything -- so a portion of the purchase price you pay for goods pays for adverts and a portion of that pays for the TV channel
That's true but the total cost with advertising may be cheaper than the cost without advertising. Advertising is done for a reason -- to make the company more money, which is supposed to give them a stronger product and better economy of scale. If you simply didn't know about any products except what the store put on display (through back deals etc) and never said "Hey why does this grocery store not carry brand X, it's much better" -- then you would potentially be stuck with an inferior, over-priced produc
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The license fee is £145.50 or around $228 USD per year. What you get is around 10 channels (2 permananet HD channels) of TV and around the same number of radio channels - ad-free, mostly impartial, relatively high-quality content. For-profit channels with advertisers pad out the rest of the spectrum.
The beep is a public service, funded by the public, so yes, it's really a tax. In return you get a media service which doesn't pander to anybody - not to politician, nor to commercial interests, nor to any
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I wonder if it's really illegal to use VPNs, though. At no point does one have to agree to a license or even claim to be from a specific country. It's all done automatically. Maybe it's moot if they can't prosecute you in a different country.
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I wonder if it's really illegal to use VPNs, though. At no point does one have to agree to a license or even claim to be from a specific country.
The door doesn't need to be locked for you to be trespassing. The relevant question is whether it was reasonable for you to infer you did not have authorization to access that server or content. If you used a proxy for the purpose of circumventing their restrictions, then you were trespassing.
As for the attitude of "they can't catch me where I'm hiding"...that's
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I'm a cycling fan in the US and watched those events via someone in the UK proxying the BBC stream. People do this for pretty much all European cycling events and blog sites like cyclingfans.com maintain links to active proxies. I could have VPN'd but just clicking a link was easier wherever I happened to be.
No doubt there were a lot of cycling viewers outside the UK, at least for the road race. Wiggins was not a big fan favorite until this year and he won over quite a lot of people who'd previously conside
Multicast (Score:2, Insightful)
The BBC used to make its streams available by multicast. If everyone used multicast then they could have streamed the Olympics with not much more than a Japanese home Internet connection.
Re:Multicast (Score:5, Informative)
Unfortunately, multicast basically doesn't work on the current internet, at least not for most users, because most networks don't properly forward it. The MBONE [savetz.com], a 1990s overlay/tunnelled network, was probably the closest it's ever gotten to general deployment outside specific controlled contexts. 2001's RFC 3170 [ietf.org] on deployment difficulties is largely still accurate, with the exception of its first sentence, "IP Multicast will play a prominent role on the Internet in the coming years."
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True, I should've said in IPv4. If the IPv6 transition really does happen to the point where most end-users can do IPv6 transport end-to-end, multicast should be a nice side benefit, assuming nobody introduces a new bone-headed way of screwing it up.
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They still multicast content, they were multicasting all the extra Olympic channels as well. You just have to be attached to the internet via a provider that's actually on MBONE - one of my house mates was watching it on multicast at work (working at a Uni has its perks).
NBC cut away (Score:1)
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I'm curious if NBC saw a traffic spike (and how big of one) when they stopped broadcasting the closing ceremony live and switched to streaming it while they switched to whatever the sitcom was.
I haven't had the telly on, but based on experience I'd be astonished if NBC isn't continuing to "cover" the Olympics this week, in hopes of milking a few more nickles out of it.
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They are covering the Olympics. The paralympics on their NBC Universal Channel (which was free over-the-air during the 2008 and 10 Olympics, but once Comcast bought NBC that ended).
BTW we'll be able to watch the 2016 games in real-time. Brazil is on Atlantic time, just one hour ahead of the zone most Americans live.
Here are NBC's stats:
- 32 million viewers during primetime broadcast (highest level since the 1976 Olympics)
- The company paid $1.18 billion for the exclusive U.S. television rights
- They sold
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No you won't. A lot of the sports events are held during the day. Your NBC will tape-delay that to prime time. Enjoy retarded ad-driven broadcasters...
see: Vancouver Olympics coverage
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympics_on_NBC#Tape_delay
"Despite the 2010 Winter Olympics being held in Vancouver, three hours behind New York, and in all of their previous Olympic coverages, NBC has delayed the broadcast of higher-profile events held during the day to air in prime time. As a result, almost none of the popular a
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You aren't considering expenses in your profit number.
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Network Gear? (Score:2)
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It will just be regular cisco kit like 6500 series switches...
They won't have pushed 700gb through a single device, the bbc has peering with most of the major isps in the uk and the 700gb figure will be combined across a large number of peering and transit links.
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I could be wrong but I'd expect to see a relatively small number of big routers (big enough to deal with full internet routing tables) at the network edge and then a larger number or switches to connect the content servers to the routers and then an even larger number of content servers.
I'd also expect to see collocated content servers in some cases. Particularly for a rare spike like the london olympics.
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I really REALLY want to see the size of their routing/switching equipment, let alone racks of gear for processing/encoding/streaming.
Hitting 700gigs/sec is PRETTY killer.
Try Akamai!
The BBC uses akamai to deliver a lot of content
Best Internet coverage ever (Score:1)
I had access to about 10 dedicated HD channels on my satellite package here in the middle east. Commercial free, with most announcers either Canadian or British ( the Abu dhabi channels were in Arabic), all from the olympic broadcasting feed. There was also an Olympic news channel and a constant stream of official Olympic documentaries. On ipad & computers there was a further 12 digital streaming channels available, but i could get that working due to low bandwidth. Watching it all was the next best th
In bed by 9pm?? (Score:1)
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Surely only a tiny fraction of people would be in bed by 9pm, so I can't see that explaining a spike in tablet use mid-evening.
My guess is that the main TV was being used to watch normal programs and the iPads (lets face it, the tablets were almost certainly ipads) were being used to follow the olympics out of the corner of the TV watcher's eye.
There wasn't much normal TV
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What normal stuff was on TV in the UK during the olympics?
Everyone I know was glued to it - to the point of watching events by mobile streaming of iPlayer on the bus or during lunch breaks. Offices were streaming it over the web. Every lab on my floor had one machine with the main feed running, and everyone was talking about it.
No one in the UK was "watching it out the corner of their eye" - at least in my experience, and clearly in the experience of the broadcaster providing the coverage.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond... (Score:2)
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I wonder how much bandwidth NBC used. Its gated wall for requiring satellite and cable TV services probably kept it down. :(
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Working As Intended.
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:(
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Huh? The 720p feeds were around 6.5Mbps. I did have to use FF as the builtin flash plugin for Chrome didn't want to use hardware acceleration for some reason so it was jumpy as all get out, the Adobe plugin used through FF was as smooth as you can expect from a live event (the archived footage was as smooth as any other stream HD content IME).
What's the big deal? (Score:1)
What a waste of bandwidth! (Score:3)
What a waste of bandwidth!
A sad day for the clever minds who invented multicast so you don't need to care about 700Gb/s
NBC (Score:2)
Seriously though, if you work all day, then come home to watch some Olympics in the evening, you'd think the only competitions there are, are some Gymnastics, Swiming, Diving, and Volleyball with a few highlights from track. You'd never know of the numerous other events. NBC coverage was so bad that they would analyze and show every person's dive, replay slowmo with computer analysis, watch them get in the
BBC.co.uk back-end (Score:2)
A BBC engineer gave an interesting talk [phpconference.co.uk] about their web platform at the PHP UK Conference 2012: "Monitoring your back end for speed and profit [youtu.be]"