Mirror Image Streams Shuttle Launch

One stop shop for Web content delivery takes local TV station's live launch coverage worldwide

By Charlie White

(7/26/05) As the space shuttle Discovery leapt away with a crackling roar from its launch pad in Florida, content delivery company Mirror Image helped Boston television station WHDH to Webcast the launch live. Not only did the shuttle?s return to space begin flawlessly today, all systems were go for its Webcast as well. After the Webcast, Digital Media Net?s Charlie White talked with John Rozen, Mirror Image?s chief operating officer, about the company?s techniques for facilitating Webcasts both large and small.

DMN: Thank you very much for talking with us today. Our readers are interested in what your company is doing, especially with this shuttle launch. What was Mirror Image's role?

Rozen: We carried the launch this morning for a local channel, WHDH TV, channel 7, an NBC affiliate in Boston. We put that up for them this morning. I?m not sure how many of our other media outlets carried it as well. We know specifically that WHDH did.

DMN: What?s new with the way you did this Webcast of the shuttle launch? What have you done to improve streaming overall?

Rozen: What we?ve done specifically is, we brought this technology to customers who otherwise normally wouldn?t have this capability. So, in the case of WHDH TV, they?re a TV outlet. They run a Web site, and normally their audience is regional. When they get content like this, like the shuttle launch, it has more of a global, or at least a national reach. For them, we bring to the table all of the preparation, the provisioning, the capacity planning, the expert support, the monitoring during the Webcast?all that is just part of what they get with this service. So, we?ve made it easy to use a globally-deployed infrastructure.

DMN: It sounds like you have a full-service outfit there, John, so if I?m at a TV station and I don?t know much about the Web, you?ll just come in and take care of everything? Is that the way it works?

Rozen: Yes. We do quite a bit of that. It?s not that we do every bit?we can bring all of that together with some partners that we work with, so we do have everything available. It?s kind of a one stop shop. We focus largely on the delivery and the network and the publishing of all this, so we have all those pieces. TV stations usually run their own encoders, and give us a publishing point, and that?s it. It?s pretty straightforward?it?s like running a little appliance.

DMN: How does that work exactly? Say I have a TV station and I?m doing a live broadcast, and I?m using an encoder for my video. How I get that signal to you? Then, what do you do with the signal after that?

Rozen: They give us a publishing point, we tie that to an ingress point, and then we feed it out across our network to egress points all over the world.

DMN: For some of our readers who aren?t familiar with what a publishing point, ingress and egress are, can you give us an idea what you mean by that?

Rozen: Yes, they?re pretty much just URLs [universal resource locator, or Web address], and IP (Internet Protocol) addresses. We would give them an IP address and a URL, they put that on their site as a URL that they can link to the video, and all of their customers then link to that URL. What happens is, depending on where they?re coming from, that URL will be fed from one of our content access points closest to them. So it?s like delivering that video locally to everyone who comes to see it. For somebody like WHDH, that means they can reach out to places like California, Asia, and Europe, where they normally wouldn?t need this type of scale.

DMN: I suppose there was tremendous interest in the shuttle launch this morning since it?s been a couple of years since the Discovery disaster. I?m sure there was a huge audience there. How did it go with that big audience?

Rozen: It was a very large audience. I don?t have specific numbers for you, but it was good, the event was great. It was about 45 minutes to an hour video feed being viewed there. The behavior was much like what we see with a lot of these events, like the Ansari X prize [a $10,000,000 prize designed to jumpstart the personal spaceflight industry]. You get viewers from a broader set than you would normally see for this type of customer. Again, with the global and national reach, the behavior is slightly different. People come on and they view video for a longer period of time than they normally would. This being a live event, you have those types of things that you normally see during a live event?you have people who are just watching as the launch is being prepared, and certainly all the way through it. It?s an extended period of time where people stay on. Normally, it?s a much larger amount of traffic than they would normally be handling for video.

DMN: If you?re doing a Webcast and you have a tremendous amount of viewers, and then suddenly there are a whole lot more than you ever anticipated, what do you do then? Do you have to call in more servers? How do you handle that kind of traffic?

Rozen: Hopefully, we do a lot of planning and understanding so that we?re not surprised, but if there is a surge, something like what happened with the X prize, or the tsunami?something that suddenly gets a great amount of interest that you weren?t expecting?we have quite a bit of capacity out there. We broaden it, and we can apply that whatever our customer needs at whatever time. It?s pretty easy for us to scale this out across this network, so we do have quite a bit of capacity that can be applied to it. If we need to, we?ll build boxes on-the-fly if it seems like it?s something we don?t have capacity deployed for, but we?ve never run into that situation.

Page: 1 2 Next Page

Related Sites: BN - Broadcast Newsroom , BN - Production , BN - Webcast , BN - People , Digital Facility

Related Newsletters: Waveform Newsletter , Streamline Newsletter