March 4th, 2008
Uh-oh: Oprah’s streamed New Earth Event runs short on bandwidth
Last night’s inaugural, Skype co-sponsored webcast of Oprah Winfrey’s Oprah.com New Earth Event scored 500,000 simultaneous log-ins.
That would be all well and good, but the gathering multitudes resulted in 242 Gbps of information moving over the ‘net at the same time.
This morning, Oprah.com is posting a statement acknowledging resulting delays in viewing the webcast, and noting that work is continuing to find a specific cause for what happened.
The statement says in part:
Harpo Productions, Inc., Move Networks and Limelight Networks recognize that interactive Internet broadcasting to a mass audience is still an emerging medium, and we’re proud to have been pioneers in pushing the industry forward. We deeply regret that some of our audience did not have an optimal viewing experience and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. The first session of the webinar will be available in its entirety for viewing on Oprah.com or for downloading as a podcast on Oprah.com or iTunes (later today).
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
