Comments on: Under the Hood: Going for Gold

By: Todd Mundt

Todd Mundt — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 13:13:24 +0000

Great piece on how all of this works! However, it seems to be working too well… viewing of the RDI live video stream is still turned off to the US. The message references the Canada-only requirement for the Olympics, but the games are over.

By: Kev

Kev — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 19:41:33 +0000

Actually, the website is delivered via a content delivery network – a bunch of computers worldwide that cache pages from the origin (in Toronto) and forward them on to users. So if you’re in Canada, you get it from a cache server on your Canadian ISP or a hop or two away, if you’re in France it’s coming from a French one, and so on. Said add-on is effectively useless for sites delivered over a CDN – either its defaults aren’t very intelligent, or your ISP is most directly hooked up to the US.

By: Blake

Blake — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:55:09 +0000

Hi Roxanne,

Where are you located? $10 says you’re located in the USA.

The CBC website is located in Toronto, Canada. We use a piece of technology called Akamai that automatically mirrors our website on servers all over the world.

We do this so that you dont have to go all the way to Canada to get our content. If you are located in the USA, then you will contact a server in the USA for our content. It’s faster this way!

By: Dwight Williams

Dwight Williams — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 18:54:59 +0000

Okay, what’s the name of that plug-in?

By: Roxanne Smith

Roxanne Smith — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 16:30:05 +0000

I just loaded up the new Firefox browser on my computer and popped in
a nifty little add-on that shows a country flag to let you know the location of the website server. Well guess what? The entire CBC site is hosted in the United States of America. What gives guys? The voice of Canada couldn’t find a Canadian server to host their own site????

By: Beijing Olympics: CBC Live Webcast Magic « Kempton - ideas Revolutionary

Beijing Olympics: CBC Live Webcast Magic « Kempton - ideas Revolutionary — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:36:50 +0000

[...] Beijing Olympics: CBC Live Webcast Magic Interesting piece about some technologies used by CBC in its Live Olympics Webcast Magic. [...]

By: Blake

Blake — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 21:37:49 +0000

Paf,

I’m not quite sure I understand your question.

The akamai reflector port is just the public streaming url. There is no Java involved at all.

By: paf

paf — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 14:53:40 +0000

The feeds worked quite well form my mac, I used the VLC media player and plugin and I was able to watch them fine on my mac. I find using flip4mac ends up screwing up the aspect ratio etc.

Another, and in my opinion better way of watching the stream is to take the direct stream address (easy to extract with an addon like adblock plus) and watch it within VLC, you then have a fully scalable window and you can have more than one stream at a time

I would of liked a more technical description of the streaming system on this post, like how the akamai reflector port works with java

By: Blake

Blake — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:20:49 +0000

Bill Lee:

As you can see, the internet didn’t “melt” anyways, even if you are watching Akamai feeds.

Did you read Akamai’s response to that article?

http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9224

By: Bill Lee

Bill Lee — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 23:29:34 +0000

Another example of servers for the Olympics videos is shown at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Linkname: Why the Olympics didn’t kill the Internet
URL: http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/buzz/archives/146456.asp

linking to http://blogs.zdnet.com/perlow/?p=9221
which explains Limelight Corp.’s agreements.

“Where Limelight differs from Akamai and why the Internet didn’t “melt” is quite simple — they are completely “off the cloud”. In other words, unlike Akamai and similar content caching providers, their system isn’t deployed over the public Internet”…….

By: jason

jason — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:00:48 +0000

Fantastic Job CBC!!!
CTV has their work cutout for them in 2010.

By: Fagstein

Fagstein — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:36:29 +0000

You couldn’t have chosen a format better than Windows Media? People on Macs have to use a special plugin, and even then the video is so choppy that it’s unwatchable.