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When Cisco Live! (a.k.a. Cisco Networkers) starts up next week, every vendor is going to try to get you to their booth, learning about their products, and telling their stories. We’re no different.
I would like to take this time to point out that all the cool kids are going to booth 807 this year, and the more time you spend at booth 807, the cooler you are.
Now, anybody can make that claim about their booth. For example, we just did.
In all seriousness, I am really looking forward to the presentation on Tuesday, June 30th at 2:30 that NBC Universal is going to be giving along with Steve Harriman, our Senior VP of Marketing, at Cisco Live, because while there are “swagger stories” abounding in this industry, sometimes some stories are just too cool.
In this case: How do you send live coverage of the Beijing Summer Olympics through to television viewers, cable viewers, mobile device viewers, and Web viewers – data totaling 3.4 petabytes?
3.4 Petabytes is over three and a half million gigabytes. Put into context, if you put that on 1.44MB floppies, the height of the stack would be roughly 2500 miles - equal to the distance between New York and Los Angeles by air. In order to pull it off, NBC had to use three 155Mbps OC-3 pipes to get the footage from Beijing, of course, monitoring and maintaining the network the whole time.
There are plenty of stories about optimizing your network, but that’s a story I really want to hear – it’s a big task, no room for error, and only one shot to get it right. Plus, you know, it’s Television. Say what you will about mocking the “old” media in the age of the Internet, television has always been glamorous, exiting, and even today remains the best way to reach the most people. So, I’m pretty psyched about it.
