Did a Small Company in China Outperform Cisco in Delivering Live Video?

Olympic Numbers - Massive Live Broadcast on the Internet ?? Who’s the biggest in Live Concurrency?

To date I’ve been trying to find the record for most concurrent viewers of a “Live” event. NewTeeVee has a breakdown and detailed article on Internet usage on the Olympics 2008 in China.

Cisco helped setup the NBC system. Translation they provided the gear and expertise to make sure there were no screwups. I’m sure they overprovisioned the hell out of it. I wonder what the costs were? I wonder how much it cost? I wonder how much that provisioning investment delivered in terms of concurrent users traffic?

From NewTeeVee:

NBCOlympics.com served a total of 75.5 million streams during the games despite all the uproar about Silverlight, tape delays and a bad UI. The site clocked a total of 9.9 million hours of online video coverage. That’s impressive, even if NBC’s online video advertising revenue wasn’t, but there are plenty of other success stories all around the globe.

The BBC also had some major success with its web-based offering, serving almost 40 million streams until late last week, according to the BBC Internet blog. It had almost 200,000 concurrent viewers watching a total of 6.5 million hours of Olympic coverage - and those figures don’t even include the competitions held the final weekend, nor the closing ceremony. The BBC hasn’t published any numbers for its iPlayer yet either, but anecdotal evidence suggests that the video platform saw its traffic triple during the games. The broadcaster only served 2.5 million streams during the games in Athens four years ago.

Other European countries saw large numbers of online viewers as well. The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) estimates that a total of 18 million viewers tuned into streams from the games, and its member networks served a total of 180 million streams online. The BBC is a member of the EBU, which means that the Brits caused almost a fourth of all of Europe’s Olympic video streams.

China’s state television network CCTV saw even bigger numbers online. The network told the New York Times that more than 100 million people accessed Olympic video streams on its web site.

But CCTV’s site wasn’t the only way to watch the Olympics in China. The network also sub-licensed the online rights to P2P TV platforms like PPLive. The company told us that a total of 5.5 million viewers used its client to watch the opening ceremony, with 1.6 million concurrent users tuning in during the ceremony itself.

PPLive’s daily concurrent viewers during the Olympics. Image courtesy of PPLive.

PPLive saw similarly high numbers during the rest of the games, with daily peak concurrent viewers anywhere between 210,000 and 500,000 during regular competition days, and climbing up to 820,000 viewers for the closing ceremony.

PPLive’s cost? Almost nothing. Any company that can scale “Live Broadcast” at steady state 500,000 users spiking to 2m concurrent users impresses the hell out of me.