Tag Archives: live video

White Smoke Over-The-Top

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Internet behavior during special events is always of interest. Last week we had our eyes on the Sistine Chapel chimney and its manifestation across the Internet. When would the black smoke turn white?

Naturally many viewers across the globe were watching live video from the Vatican simultaneously. The smart nodes in our DiViCloud network could identify these simultaneous similar sessions.

We found out that high peaks were demonstrated in international traffic flowing to Central American and specifically to Costa Rica and El Salvador. The graphs below, taken from a specific ISP in Costa Rica, show the clear live traffic spike, comprising over 10% of the total international traffic.

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Our DiViLive value-added-service unifies multiple live-video sessions into a compacted format. By using DiViLive, ISPs can load x10 live sessions on the same bandwidth.

Live traffic stats during El Clásico

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This time we took a closer (and geeky) look at traffic stats during El Clásico - the major Spanish football match. We analyzed traffic flowing from our DiViCloud PoPs to one of the European ISPs we serve.

We isolated the Live traffic from the general traffic, by using the DiViLive capability. DiViLive identifies Live unicast sessions, transferring the same data to multiple users at the same time, and eliminates this redundancy, making way for x5-10 Live sessions.

The diagram below shows only the Live traffic during the period 19:00-01:00 on different days.

The El Clásico match took place on October 6th, demonstrating a spike of over 6x above the baseline live traffic volumes.

It was very interesting to see that in many other days, apart from October 6th, Live traffic spikes during evening hours. Can you match these to other Live events?

Euro 2012 – A view from the content side

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In yesterday’s post I decrowned the Internet as the medium for watching planned live event. A comment from Svetoslav Hristov of Evolink revealed a different picture. Evolink put Euro 2012 online for the Bulgarian national TV. See figure below.

Evolink CDN traffic during Euro 2012 semi-finals and final

As opposed to the decline in traffic viewed at Internet Exchanges (IX) during matches, Evolink’s traffic increased from around 5Gbps to over 17Gbps during the final. That’s a very high impact compared to around 60Gbps total Bulgarian IX traffic.

The decline in IX traffic as observed by RIPE is due to people being busy with watching the match on TV or Internet. It would have been much deeper if live traffic was omitted.

Euro 2012 – TV is still king (but watch the throne)

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In the aftermath of Euro 2012 (and no, I’m not trying to replace Prandelli’s…) we learn one clear lesson – TV still dominates live video consumption.

The figure below (source: RIPE’s study) shows traffic in DE-CIX Munich Internet Exchange during the Germany-Greece match (22 June), compared to traffic same time in previous weeks.  As people get ready for the match – driving to friends, catching a nap, cooling the beers – Internet traffic declines. During the break they turn to check out what others say on the net.

Traffic seen at DECIX Munich during Germany v Greece match on 22 June 2012

Yesterday’s final was no different. Check out TOP-IX - Torino’s Exchange point – traffic stats.

Traffic seen at TOPIX Torino during Spain v. Italy match on 1 July 2012

So TV is still holding the throne for planned live events. Yet, we are keeping a close look on two trends:

Near-live traffic is booming. Missed the goal? Want to hear the Spanish Goooooal? Wish to poke your Italian friends? Go to the web.

Many events are not freely accessible on TV. Some events are premium, whereas others are just not broadcasted at all places. DiViNetworks serves many territories where people turn to the Internet to take part of such mainstream events. One example is presented in the graph below, demonstrating traffic growth during  a soccer match, as well as DiViLive‘s capability to flatten live traffic. The red marks the traffic actually passing on the link, and the green marks the virtual capacity generated by DiViLive (operating on live and near-live data). The traffic added due to the live event is shrunk to 10% of its original size.

Traffic during a soccer match flattened with DiViLive