How many of our geek readers attempted to watch the inauguration online yesterday? I did, as did some of my coworkers. We had the best streaming on our enterprise machines that are on the clearest, non-proxied connection. Machines in proxied labs could not keep the feed running no matter where they went.
We opted for cnn.com’s coverage in my computer lab on campus. We logged into an early stream, about 9 a.m. Central time, and managed to keep it running with only a few pauses throughout the next three hours. My desktop machine did okay for a while, but by the time we got to the speech, I was losing my connection pretty regularly. There were at least a dozen of us gathered around one monitor to watch the proceedings.
I’m glad that we were able to watch this rather historic moment. But I am disturbed by the epic quality of the live feed fails that seemed rampant. It didn’t seem to matter what news or video site you tried, the live feed was just not there for people. At this point, live feed of important information to large amounts of people (a million or more) is just not possible in any kind of quality, dependable form.
As much as we’d like to think that the Internet may replace our televisions soon, I just don’t think “soon” is going to cut it. Yesterday’s online sluggishness rather proves that point, in my mind. Yes, more bandwidth can be added, more proxy servers to serve up content, more and more powerful servers can be purchased and put online, but that all costs money, and I don’t see it being spent in this way any time soon.
I think yesterday was a good litmus test for live online delivery of media. We have a bit of ways to go before it can give us what comes out of the boob-tube during a major event.