Webcasting’s Big Day: MySpace Going On Now, Oprah Later Tonight

I can’t remember a previous time when two webcasts of such large scale took place on the same day. I’m watching the Operation MySpace webcast now and the video looks great. I have the high stream going at 1.5 Mbps 1.3 Mbps and am not getting any distortion. Full screen looks pretty good but has some pixelation on a 15" monitor, which is to be expected. KulaByte is encoding the stream at low, medium and high bitrates and Akamai is delivering the video, being played back with Flash 9. Will be interesting to hear what the simultaneous stream count is for this when it is over, what the average bitrate was and how many could get the HD stream.

And later tonight, Oprah will be doing another class on Oprah.com
and says that all previous technical issues have been worked out and
that they expect an even larger audience than the 500,000 simultaneous
they had last time. The Oprah site says that so far they have over
800,000 people pre-registered. Limelight Networks will be delivering
that webcast and it will require Move Networks client.

Update 4:41PM EST: For the past 10 minutes, the My Space video is really stuttering and the
audio is a few seconds behind the video. The video has dropped to about 12
frames per second from the 30+ I was getting before. Moving down from the high to the medium stream is not solving the quality issues. Lots of stuttering and the low stream is doing 8.2 frames per second for me.

Update: Akamai has informed me they will not be giving out traffic stats from the MySpace webcast. For more technical details surrounding the encoding of the event you can read this article on StreamingMedia.com