March Madness On Demand and Akamai
March Madness is the best tournament on earth. For 3 weeks during the end of March and beginning of April, 65 college football teams square off in an orgy of upsets and thrillers. This year, CBS expanded its online on demand live streaming. Working all day, the only time I have to watch games are at night. By streaming the videos, it gives me a chance to at least listen to the games while I work. This way everyone wins: I get to keep track of my favorite games and CBS gets to serve me more ads.
Being a geek, I really wanted to see how the March Madness on demand service will handle the bandwidth of serving the video. I found this InformationWeek article that points out that Akamai is used to stream their videos. This makes sense because Akamai has always been a huge player in the contend delivery market. From their site, Akamai claims it “handles 20% of the world’s total Web traffic.” Now those are big numbers. Even with Akamai’s large content delivery network, “CBSSports.com monitors and throttles its system based on usage and historical data patterns” so that it won’t overload their system. The fact that CBS has to restrict the amount of people using this service shows how far the US has to go if it wants to be completely digital.
For really cool visualization of global web traffic, check out this Akamai flash app.