Silverlight and the Olympic sized streaming effort

When my wife complained about missing out on some of the Olympic action on TV due to her work schedule, I was quick to remind her about the availability of the games online. Part of the reason for my enthusiasm for it was that as a Product Manager for the Streaming Perspective at Keynote, I got a peek into the efforts that go into making that happen. Streaming Perspective is being used extensively by media companies in various countries to ensure that the Olympic streams on their Web site meet the customer expectation.

Closer to home in US, Keynote integrated Microsoft Silverlight into its streaming measurement infrastructure to help measure the performance aspects of the Silverlight streams as seen on NBCOlympics.com on MSN. More details in the press release.

How measurement helps:

As any performance enthusiast would know, to ensure the highest quality experience of a video for a live event, it is not only important that you make sure that the infrastructure is up to the task, using the load testing, but also one should continuously monitor the performance of the video streams. This becomes more important as the monetization aspects of video streams on Web become clearer. The demand for the videos on line were impressive NBC alone averaged more than 1.5 million viewers daily, source: http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/fans-around-the-world-following-the-olympics-online-5703/ and (http://www.beet.tv/2008/08/nbc-olympics-on.html).

Some technical details on the metrics:

Some of the key points that Streaming Perspective collects are:

 Availability from different geographical location
 DNS Resolution Delta
 TCP/IP Connect Deltas
 Number of TCP Connections
 Total Sent & Received Bytes
 Total Number of Sent & Received Socket Buffers
 Connect Time
 Initial Buffering Delta
 Total Rebuffering Delta
 Total Rebuffering Count
 Average Rendered Frames Per Second

When you take a holistic view of the data collected the performance bottlenecks become very obvious, allowing your team to take the necessary action to fix the issue.

How can you measure from your desktop?

In addition to streaming video measurements my colleague Bard Boston, also managed to get Silverlight network/file metrics using KITE and from his desktop (to get a free copy of KITE, go to http://kite.keynote.com). The unique aspect of this is: using Streaming Perspective to monitor stream quality in a Silverlight player, and coupling that with the network metrics of Silverlight http delivery methodology, administrators have an unparalleled view into streams delivered over the internet. Here is some overview of the metrics collected.

For those of you who want to see it for yourself, Bard has listed the steps to get this metrics right from your desktop, detailed instructions will soon be posted on the KITE community (http://kite.keynote.com/community).

Step 1. Download Silverlight Beta 2 (for video streaming) to your desktop. This can be found at either nbcolympics.com or Microsoft.com

Step 2: Download and install KITE.

Step 3 Build a KITE script using the stream URL found in the NBC player.