Foo Fighters: Bandwidth Broadcasters

A week ago, I shared with you my experiences two nights earlier watching the live stream of a U2 concert on YouTube. Although the band’s performance at the Rose Bowl broke records with a sellout crowd of 97,014, the Akamai-aided attendance was even more mpressive…an estimated 10 million streams served.

Friday night, as a follow-up, I tuned in to a Livestream-served and Facebook-sponsored Foo Fighters live jam session. At 7PM, there were around 13,000 folks online; by 7:30PM when I grabbed the following screenshot, more than 16,000 streams were being served:

As with the prior Sunday’s U2 show, the presentation was computer-only in form. Among other things, this format allowed for a live discussion stream between Facebook members, including requests that the band regularly monitored and used to tailor the song list. And of course, it also allowed Facebook to serve advertisements on the right side of the screen.

The video and associated two-channel audio were glitch-free, but this was in no small part due to the fact that Livestream made the job easier for itself than did Google and its YouTube subsidiary a few days earlier. The above screenshot is 1276×778 pixels in size; from those dimensions, you can discern how miniscule the video window (which also could not be expanded to full screen) was. I also watched it on my Intel CPU-based, performance-optimized MacBook Air, versus on the archaic dual G5 Power Mac I’d used before.