Just did a story on this yesterday...

http://www.nwfusion.com/news/0917starr.html

'Net braces for Clinton testimony

By Sandra Gittlen Network World Fusion, 9/17/98

In London, the BBC's online venture is also gearing up. BBC Online has capacity for 20,000 concurrent videostreams, said marketing editor Keith Roberts.

Err, 10K license but that doesn't g'tee there's enough b/w for it. If it was a 28K stream that'd be 280M, we have around 145M total for this. If it was just a 5K speech service it'd be nicer. Speaking to a number of ISP & large users the other week there were conflicting opinions on this: ISP - Multicast doesn't scale, will cost too much to roll out, doesn't have an obvious pricing model and so on so we're not going to do it. Plus b/w will be so cheap it we won't care (assumes the Telcos pass on that low cost) Users - this is crazy, we should have multicast we can't keep burning so much b/w sending the same packets down the same wires

The BBC has some experience with this sort of massive demand. Last August, the still nascent BBC Web effort was hard hit by mourners seeking footage of Princess Diana. Although the site did not crash, it did slow down, Roberts said.

Yeah but I cheated and had 8 ISP's, RealNetwork & AOL help out by rebroadcasting our stream.

The BBC hosts its own RealPlayer video and audio servers separate from the main site's Web servers. "That way, if there is enormous pressure for video and audio, the Web servers for the site will not be affected," he said.

True the News web servers are on a seperate link but the Real servers share with other services... brandon