Summary: The 2008 Beijing and 2010 Vancouver Games streamed Olympics video without a hitch. But 2012 could be different.
Way back in 2008 I wrote a series of articles highlighting the video streaming technologies behind the Beijing Summer Olympics. At the time, there was actually some some real concern that demand for watching the video feeds that were live broacast from the event using personal computers would overwhelm Internet pipes at at major ISPs, causing widespread broadband performance issues for residences and businesses.
As it turned out, the video was delivered just fine, and no services at ISPs were disrupted. Much of this was credited towards the resiliency of the solutions and partners that NBC chose — Akamai Technologies was used for static content and Limelight Networks was used for the live video streams.
That they were both able to accomplish this from around the world and through their network of distributed datacenters and peered ISP connections is nothing short of incredible.
In 2010, Akamai itself was chosen for the streaming technology for Vancouver, and yet again, the video streamed with no problems.
ZDNet – Why the 20112 Summer Olympics might melt the Internet
Tags: data center downtime, data center reliability, data center uptime
