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By Brian Boyko
Every year, I watched the Super Bowl and talked over the game, paying rapt attention to the commercials.
This year, there's YouTube, and the good commercials will likely be online far before the halftime show ends. And if advertising agencies are savvy, they'll be uploading them minutes - before - the Super Bowl commercial airs on TV. (What? You think a company's going to send a C&D to get people to stop watching their advertisements? No company is that stupid.)
YouTube itself has a page specifically dedicated to Super Bowl commercials. And that doesn't include the highlights or the possibility of a "wardrobe malfunction."
So since I don't have much interest in the actual game, I, like many other geeks, have other plans this Sunday.
(Continued...)
Google is likely prepared for the amount of traffic it will receive. But many corporate WANs and LANs are going to be simply hammered by the Super Bowl traffic to YouTube, MetaCafe, and other video sites.
YouTube isn't the only problem. A significant consideration for companies with workers overseas is SlingBox and similar devices, which allow you to stream material from your home television to anywhere on the Internet. Why should your sales team in Asia or South America miss out on American Super Bowl coverage when they can watch it on their own monitors at work, where there's always a fast connection?
A survey by Network World of people who use computers at work stated that 26% of respondents plan to watch game-related video on Sunday via corporate Internet access. And that doesn't even begin to deal with the aftershocks of people watching and re-watching Super Bowl ads and videos on Monday morning and beyond.
Despite the dire warnings of Super Bowl meltdowns, comparatively, this is a problem that network engineers want to have. There's going to be a spike in traffic, that spike is going to be predictable and will die down in a few days. The worst problems are the ones you can't prepare for - this, comparatively, is something that you can and should prepare for. Additionally, network monitoring tools employed on Sunday can help you examine exactly how your network performs when a large spike of traffic occurs - so that you know what to expect when another large spike of traffic occurs, this time, unexpectedly.
So we ask network engineers out there: What are you doing to help prepare your network for Super Bowl Sunday?
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