"I'm just hoping to have a successful class and that we don't blow out the Internet."
Oprah Winfrey, USA Today 3-3-08
Oprah's webcast "A New Earth" with Eckhart Tolle did not blow out the Internet, but it sure did blow up the servers she had dedicated to stream her webcast live.
The much anticipated webcast - a paradigm shift for Cultural Creatives world-wide - scored 500,000 simultaneous log-ins.
That would be all well and good, but the gathering multitudes resulted in 242 Gbps of information moving over the web at the same time, resulting in jerky, buffered reception at best & completely stalled feeds at worst.
The obvious solution is more bandwidth & more servers.
Interestingly, when we received the next notification e-mail "Week 2: Your Special Link to Oprah's Live Web Event", we are told that "our goal is to provide as many of you as possible with a positive experience. If we should see a significant decline in video quality, we may limit the size of the class that evening."
Is Oprah clogging the pipes of the Internet backbones? Or is there a ceiling on the bandwidth budget for this project? For those "midlifers who are seeking spiritual growth", their inexperience & frustration may dampen enthusiasm at least for the live interactive aspect of the class. It looks like Oprah is learning about this right along with us. We'll just see what happens tonight. Until then, to help pick-up where we left off, here's the last section of last week's class:
