[opendtv] Re: Sling TV Struggles During Final Four | Multichannel
- From: Craig Birkmaier <craig@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <opendtv@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 8 Apr 2015 08:48:05 -0400
On Apr 7, 2015, at 9:52 PM, Manfredi, Albert E <albert.e.manfredi@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Craig Birkmaier wrote:
I thought you said the Internet is ready for this stuff...
And I thought you said there was scant demand for Sling TV, Craig.
I did. A little blip Saturday night was all it took to cause the problems
described in the story. And this spike in demand was anticipated, yet the
system could not handle it.
It just proves that we are still in the early stages of using the Internet to
deliver popular live content to large audiences. This kind of outage is quite
common for live streams - Apple has had similar issues with demand exceeding
capacity for some of their product introduction events. In this case the
problem was compounded by the need to access the server setting up
subscriptions, which was overloaded, then waiting for verification before
joining the live stream from TBS, which was also overloaded.
By the way Bert, unlike the Monday night championship game which was on CBS,
the only way to watch the semi-finals on TBS was with a MVPD subscription. I
suspect a few people signed up for Sling just to watch these games, but will
stick around for the month they paid for. A bit pricy to watch two basketball
games, but wrestling and boxing pay per view events often cost more.
Do you see anywhere in that article where the claim is made that "the
Internet is not ready for this stuff"? I don't. All I see is that Sling
didn't anticipate the huge demand, Craig.
Clearly Sling was not ready. The article stated that engineers worked with
network partners to rebalance the load for those affected. This suggests that
some of the peering connections were overloaded and they had to reroute traffic
through other interconnections to get around the congestion.
What we have here is much like the physical road infrastructure. I suspect you
get stuck in traffic jams around D.C. from time to time, and know to avoid
certain areas during events that cause traffic congestion. The same is true for
routing traffic through the Internet. Good engineering can anticipate some of
this, but there will be congestion during popular events that requires
real-time intervention.
This is why the Internet is not ready for a massive shift from dedicated video
delivery infrastructures to IP streaming over the interconnection pipes and the
last mile ISPs. And it is a contributing factor to the decision to limit the
number of subscribers to a few million.
You need to understand the technical issues here. You will see no one waiting
around for "the Internet to be ready," Craig.
I do understand the issues Bert. Infrastructure is expensive at all levels of
the stack. Apple, Google, Amazon, Akamai, Cogent and others are spending
billions on server farms and co-location servers to turn your dream into
reality. As they say, Rome wasn't built in a day.
Clearly these companies are not waiting around. They are building the
infrastructure to support it, but this take time and money, and planning, so
that everything scales up at a pace that can be supported. We will continue to
see problems pop up like Sling experienced Saturday night; it is the nature of
the evolution we are going through.
Regards
Craig
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