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Presidential Inauguration Live Streaming - Landmark Event or Bust? Part II

Posted on | January 27, 2009

As I discuss in Part I of this post, my experience of the live streaming of the Presidential Inauguration was actually quite good.  About half hour into the Presidential Inauguration live stream on CNN.com Live with Facebook, I was prompted to install the Octoshape plugin.  The small window that opened up in the browser did not tell me anything about this plugin or why I needed it, but being familiar with Octoshape, I clicked ‘OK’.  That was it, the stream continued and unlike some who lost connectivity or could not connect at all, I watched the entire inauguration online.

Octoshape logo

Octoshape is essentially a grid streaming technology that routes streams from the most favorable source, that being a server or a peer that is tuned into to same program.  In my case, apparently, the most favorable stream was coming from a peer – someone most likely in geographical proximity to me.  While peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies have been around for a while, and majority of Internet traffic is P2P, most of this is file transfer, ala Napster.  New P2P technologies are being implemented that support live streaming.  Grid streaming takes it a step further to optimize traffic between servers and end users by using peer-assisted streaming.

Why is this important?  Clearly, in the example mentioned above, it allowed me to continue receiving the stream when traffic demands exceeded provisioned server capacity.  According to various reports including Cisco’s ‘Entering the Zetabyte Era’, bandwidth constraints are most likely to happen in access networks, or the last mile in Telco lingo. There are various reasons for it, but both intuitively and technically it makes sense that this be the case.  Last mile bandwidth is either shared or comprised of legacy cabling.  Unlike the backbone and metro area networks, very little if any excess capacity exists.  There is limited  room, if any, to manage traffic during flash demands, as one can do with routing algorithms in ‘the cloud’.  

This is where grid streaming addresses the problem by minimizing the distance that packets travel with some neighborly sharing.  Grid streaming, like P2P, utilizes upstream bandwidth of peers, which is generally underutilized.  These algorithms, unlike file based P2P, also manage upstream bandwidth utilization, so that the streams a user is receiving are typically comprised of smaller streams from multiple peers.  Indiscriminate use of upstream bandwidth by some P2P schemes is what has caused a stir among ISPs.

Secondly, grid streaming reduces the load on origin and edge servers, which seemed to have been the main reported issue with users who could not watch the inauguration online.  They had to wait in a waiting room till a stream could be made available.  However, based on the comments floating by on the Facebook feed provided by CNN.com, there may have also been dropped connections on account of bandwidth congestion.

Shape of Things to Come?

Grid streaming is gaining traction in the market, and as more such live events draw increasingly larger audiences, I expect to see more use of it to deliver scalable events.  In addition to Octoshape, other companies providing similar peer-assisted grid streaming are Rawflow, Abacast, and a new entrant and former client DigiMeld.  I expect the list to grow, given the prevalence of traditional P2P companies (more than 50 the last time I counted).

That said, grid streaming has some limitations that may not work for every type of event.  Because of the inherent architecture, latency can be an issue.  My CNN.com Live stream lagged the television broadcast by up to 1 minute.  It could have been more.  That was not a critical requirement for the inauguration, but may not work well if you are a betting man or woman and watching sports, or doing a count down for the New Year.

What do you think?  Start a discussion below.

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Category: Grid Streaming, P2P, Technology

Comments

One Response to “Presidential Inauguration Live Streaming - Landmark Event or Bust? Part II”

  1. Presidential Inauguration Live Streaming - Landmark Event or Bust? Part I : TechMediaTalk
    February 12th, 2009 @ 9:06 am

    [...] assisted streams.  This improved the quality and continuity of my stream.  I’ll cover this as a separate post, but at some point the CNN system figured I would be better off shifting to a peer-assisted stream, [...]

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