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Delivering Video On Demand (Part Of An Ongoing Blog Series)

One day after the official launch of Hulu's Internet TV service, Thursday's New York Times warned of a bandwidth crunch on the Internet in the not-too-distant future. Video traffic on YouTube alone, data showed, was as much as all Internet traffic in 2000. Next week begins CBS Sports.com's March Madness On Demand, and for now neither CBS Sports, nor its key partner, Akamai, are worried.

CBS Interactive CTO Mark Kortekaas and Akamai Chief Strategist Tim Napoleon both were as calm as Dick Vitale during baseball season when I talked to them last week. Kortekaas was so soft-spoken and relaxed in his mid-town New York office I was looking around for a Hookah pipe; Napoleon sounded like he'd stepped out of an early St. Patrick's Day party. He's a USC guy, though, so I guess that's what you'd expect.

That's because they've done this many times before and because the planning and architectural design that go into this is well thought out, well tested, and well planned.

And because the Internet is hardly going to suffer from the onslaught of video despite statistics like YouTube generating as much traffic as the entire 2000 Internet.

Akamai has more than 30,000 servers at more than 1,400 locations on more than 900 networks in 70 countries. Adding servers during peak traffic, routing around particular problems (like an outage in Tawain last week), constantly monitoring Internet traffic in real time from its Cambridge operations center, makes serving live video feeds a fairly trivial affair, according to Napoleon.

Naturally, an event like March Madness On Demand is unique. It happens during work hours on its first and second days, so the traffic is unpredictable, comes in massive bunches at the last minute, and bursts during times that are only human (not machine) knowable, like when a number 15 seed is about to upset a second seed with two minutes left in the game. Kortekaas and his team have implemented a Waiting Room application where incoming viewers get placed as usage statistics are balanced between the application and Akamai's monitoring system (Akamai provides an API that allows this communication to take place).

CBS Sports.com's VP of Technology, Tony Fernandes, said that he likes to keep the waiting room at about 75% capacity. At 100%, everyone shuts down, so the headroom becomes an important metric to track. He'll let it get as high as 95%, but statistical analysis allows the system to ratchet down when necessary -- CBS Sports.com knows, for example, that the typical user watches for about 30 minutes.

The problems, says Napoleon, are never with the Internet, but almost always with glitches like getting a video signal from a satellite truck (say in a bad storm), or another part of the system crashing (like the registration system). Oh, and corporations blocking access.

So, uh, let's just all turn our backs on this little issue, just for the day. OK?

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