Summer sports set to put broadband capacity to the test
This summer is going to see a lot of records smashed and not just on the Olympic race track. Like most sports in the digital age, the Beijing games will be simulcast on television and broadband, leading most experts to predict audience figures will shoot through the proverbial roof and test broadband networks to the limit.
After not being unduly tested by interest in Euro 08, thanks to no home nations qualifying, ISPs are likely to get a test run for this summer’s surge in demand with Wimbledon at the end of June and beginning of July when the BBC will be streaming the two games it is showing on BBC One and BBC Two as well as two or three additional games being shown to interactive television viewers.
The problem for ISPs and sporting video is that it is so unpredictable and so traffic loads could well depend on the progress of Andy Murray. Home grown surprise success was certainly a large factor in the last Rugby World Cup when England were not expected to do well but, against all the odds reached the final and, in so doing, sent the RFU’s web service crashing.
“It was exciting the team did so well but we just weren’t ready for the surge in traffic,” says Kate Saunders, Digital Media Manager at the RFU. “To be honest the site fell over with all the interest from fans.”
If this is what can happen with just a news and information service, one can imagine the extra strains of live sporting action. In fact, recent research from analysts Telco 2.0 shows that demand for the BBC’s streaming and download catch-up service, iPlayer, has placed a huge strain on bandwidth for ISPs. The average person watching just 19 minutes per month trebles the costs per customer for an ISP to manage from 6p to 18p. This 19 minutes worth of viewing per month, the analysts calculate, adds 1,000GB of extra demand per month on ISPs, whilst an hour per week is calculated at 15,000 GB of extra bandwidth and an hour per day rockets demand by 111,000 GB.
This obviously makes ominous reading for ISPs because they need to buy the extra bandwidth from, typically, BT to ensure their services run smoothly yet there is no extra revenue stream to pay. One ISP, PlusNet, has already estimated the cost of streaming on its network has gone up from £17k to £51k per month since Christmas.
This is potentially the reason behind Tiscali opting to buy a highlights Wimbledon package. Certainly Dipesh Morjaria, head of digital media sales at IMG Worldwide, which handles sports rights for Wimbledon believes it was a major factor.
“Tiscali knows that people can get highlights and video off the BBC website but they’re keen to have an area for Wimbledon that will retain people on their service and earn advertising revenue rather than having them disappear to the BBC,” he says.
There is real need for concern here because, according to Akamai, which provides the internet broadcasting infrastructure for the majority of live sporting and musical events around the globe, demand this summer is going to be bigger and sustained over a long period.
It predicts the current viewing record is almost certain to be smashed. It is held by the green music event Live Earth which, at its peak last July, saw 93Gbps of demand on the company’s network, equating to a peak concurrent audience of 237,000 people.
As Emma Wright, Digital Media Manager for Akamai in Northern Europe points out, when its record is broken, new records are likely to stay within the realm of sports now that the rights to simulcast top live actions are in place.
“The big music concerts led the way online but now a lot of the sporting rights issues have been cleared up, we’re expecting sport to dominate broadband online,” she says. “We already see major spikes in Europe for Premier League and Champions League games mid-week and at the weekend so as more sport becomes available we’re expecting to see more and more record ’spikes’.”
Beijing will almost certainly test broadband connections to the limit because each day’s live television coverage will finish around the end of the working day in Europe, prompting people to watch the big moments online at work rather than on a television at around the same time school children are coming home and logging on.
Sky Sports has already confirmed time of day was the reason behind the biggest spike it ever experienced when England took to the field at the end of the working day in the ill-fated Euro 2008 qualifier with Russia.
Now that football deals by the FA Premier League and Uefa Champions League have led the way in insisting games are simulcast (the FA Cup and England home games are following suit from next season) other sporting events are expected to follow suit. This summer’s other top attractions of Wimbledon, the Ryder Cup and the Open are already simulcast and, for the first time this season, so now is F1.
So, perhaps a benchmark test for broadband providers this summer will be how well they cope with surges in demand around Olympic events, such as the ever-popular 100m final. The difficulty is, these surges can surprise domestic broadband providers because what little history of broadband sports there has been to date shows that if a country’s athletes are doing unexpectedly well in another time zone, online demand suddenly spikes.
Akamai found this out last summer when Scandinavian athletes did far better than expected at the IAAF World Championships in Osaka, Japan and a trickle of online interest suddenly shot up to an unprecedented demand of 30Gbps which set a record for the region.
