The Dow Jones Newswires report that Google will acquire On2 Technologies, a company that makes video compression, for $106.5M worth of stock, presumably for the video site YouTube.

It’s an awfully big investment - (a hefty 6.7x multiple of On2’s trailing twelve months (TTM) revenue, one of the highest multiples in tech over the last 18 months) - for a site which is perpetually the butt of jokes about not being able to turn a profit. But there are a number of reasons it might be a smart move.

At it’s core, Google has always been about using the power of computing to make information searchable and organized.  Video has a major limitation – unlike text, you cannot search by keyword, only by ‘tags’ – self-reported information – or by context, in this case, “links.” If 12 people link to a video with the word “Tango,” for example, then chances are the video is about tango in some shape or form. 

But Google is pretty good about finding ways around these limitations.  Google 411 was a free service that had a secondary function – it allowed for Google to improve its voice recognition algorithms to the point where it could offer Google Voice.  And if it can offer Google Voice, which automatically transcribes audio voicemail messages into searchable text, it’s not that much of a leap to transcribe the audio track of uploaded video into searchable messages.  That makes video more attractive to advertisers. 

Where On2 fits into this is that On2 offers a video codec, called VP6, which is compatible with Flash video and provides roughly the same quality as the current standard, H.264, at the same bitrates (filesizes).  However, the processing power needed to decode (play) the VP6 codec is significantly less than the processing power needed to decode the H.264 codec. 

Obviously, this is an advantage for Google, who is producing its own “Google OS” for use with low-powered netbooks.  Plus, there’s an awful lot of slow computers out there that are still in use. 

But less obviously – and this is a guess – because VP6 takes less processing power to decode, complex complications – like trying to do voice recognition – can be done faster when decoding thousands of VP6 files at once, compared to thousands of H.264 files at once.  Even if the difference is on the order of microseconds per video, when you’re talking about the millions of videos on YouTube, those little microseconds add up quickly. 

Perhaps Google is losing money, but it may be because they're creating, essentially, a new application, and trying to get the best performance for it before trying to market it, and increases in application performance can often offset hardware costs, power requirements, or bandwidth needs. 

By Keith Bendy
Business Development Manager, NetQoS

It’s hard to miss the “human network” theme in virtually all of Cisco’s recent commercials. They are clearly advocating a lot of converged network capabilities – voice, video, and other interpersonal communication or information methods.

It makes sense – video and voice are bandwidth heavy applications, and it’s a logical growth area for Cisco if they can provide more information about video and voice traffic. The challenge, however, is that despite all the video products they’ve brought into the market, (from Telepresence to the acquisition of Flip), there aren’t a lot of robust capabilities built into the products in order to troubleshoot performance.

Medianet is one of the largest initiative in Cisco’s history, and it’s focused on bringing those exact troubleshooting capabilities to the market. The objective is to integrate media traffic reporting into Cisco products and IOS, and get the ability to really understand what performance is for video and voice traffic. And in addition to troubleshooting, even having the ability to have the infrastructure react to changes in performance (i.e., “Autoprovisioning”) is really what the overall goal is for MediaNet.

MediaNet is just starting up, but Cisco is addressing a need that is very real, so I anticipate that its adoption will be high. Cisco may be ahead of the demand curve, but the need is pretty well established.

At a very high level, what's important to MediaNet customers is the ability to understand what performance looks like, find out where the issues are, and then drill in to get the information required to get the issue on the path to resolution. And so, when Cisco wanted to demonstrate the MediaNet capabilities at Cisco Live, they used NetQoS Performance Center because they have a lot of experience working with NetQoS (on products like WAAS, ACE and NAM) and it can take advantage of capabilities that exist today (like NBAR, IPSLA, and Netflow)

With Netflow, the NetQoS Performance Center is able to show how much video is on the network, and use TOS values to determine how the traffic is tagged. We can also see what the end-point IP addresses are. But NBAR provides deeper recognition of the protocols than what Netflow will typically give you. NBAR reports on specific tags for various traffic - instead of saying "This particular TOS queue is all my video traffic, and I don't know what kind of video it is," the NBAR identifiers would say: "This is telepresence traffic, this is security camera traffic, this is WebEx traffic, this is a video-capable phone” - and tag all of it appropriately.

Below is a video, from Cisco’s YouTube page, where Aamer Akhter, Technical Marketing Engineer at Cisco, demos the Cisco Medianet 1.0 network.

By Brian Boyko
Editor, Network Performance Daily

I’ve been getting better and better with video as I’ve worked here – and I noticed that many people don’t really understand the nature of digital video files – what makes one file big, what makes one small, what makes one 20 MB file look good, while another 20 MB file looks lousy. 

Considering that Cisco is claiming that video will take up 90% of all traffic by 2013, it might be important go over some of the ideas about what makes up digital video files at the low level so that you can understand how they impact your network. 

If you already know this, I apologize. 

Digital video files are, essentially, pictures.  Multiple pictures played in sequence, with an audio track.  And like digital pictures, they can be compressed.  Uncompressed video is like a photo in BMP format – perfectly accurate, but huge.  Compressed video is like a JPG file – it creates artifacts, but is much smaller. 

There are many compression schemes, with advantages and disadvantages, based on different ways to compress the file.  Some are more effective at reproducing more accurate information with smaller filesizes, but ultimately, from a networking perspective, it’s really not important which you’re using.  What is important is the resolution, framerate, and bitrate. 

The resolution is the size of the video in terms of how many pixels you can see on screen.  It’s usually in varying rectangle sizes, but it’s usually expressed as the size of the rectangle (i.e., 640x480) rather than the absolute number of pixels.   High definition television comes in two types: 1920x1080 (a.k.a. “1080”) and 1280x720 (a.k.a. “720”), and “720” is the format used for YouTube high definition video.  Standard definition television comes as either 720x480 (NTSC) or 720x576 (PAL).  

The framerate is the number of frames – or pictures – that are shown each second.  In a filmed Hollywood movie, it’s typically 24 frames per second (or 24p).  On television, and with most recording equipment, they usually show 30 frames per second in the U.S. and 25 frames per second elsewhere in the world – though, in order to get faster motion, they often stagger every other line of resolution and place them between every other frame – so when you watch 30 frames per second of TV, you’re really watching 60 “half-frames” per second - also known as 60 interlaced frames  (or “60i”).

Finally, the bitrate is the number of bits of information that are in the file for each second of video.  A file with a bitrate of 512kbps has exactly 512 kilobits per second in order to convey all the information it can about the video.  With more bits, you can contain more information. 

Ultimately, the only thing impacting the network is the bitrate.  Bitrate determines filesize for downloadable video, and bitrate determines bandwidth requirements for streaming video.   A 3Mbps SD video will be the same filesize as a 3Mbps HD video, for example, provided that they are the same length. 

The quality of the video, however, is impacted by resolution and framerate as well as bitrate.  

In one second of 640x480 video at 30 frames a second, and 24 bits per pixel, you have 210 megabits worth of information.  Representing that, with, say 3 megabits is a daunting task.  On the other hand, if you increase the framerate to high definition – 1280x720 – you get 632 megabits of data per second – and representing that with only 3 megabits is an even more daunting task. 

The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality of the video; but the higher the resolution and framerate, the more you have to increase the bitrate in order to get the same level of quality.  High definition files tend to be larger than standard definition files because they’re usually – but not always – rendered at a higher bitrate. 

This was one of the reasons that when NBC was covering the Olympics, they often sent the raw footage from Beijing in low-resolution, low-bitrate formats, and only sent high-resolution files to their editors in the U.S. when they knew exactly which shots they wanted to include in their broadcasts.

By way of metaphor, think of bitrate as a fixed amount of butter that you have to butter bread.  You could spread out a single pat of butter on a whole loaf of bread, but it wouldn’t taste very buttery.  Or you could just butter one slice with that pat, but the bread wouldn’t be very filling.

Where different compression schemes come in is that they’re ways to use the limited amount of bits in each second of video to represent all the information – some compression schemes simply look better than others.  Right now, the leader seems to be H.264, which is about twice as efficient as the file system used to store information on a DVD (MPEG-2.)  A 3Mbps H.264 file and 3Mbps MPEG-2 file will have the same filesize, but the H.264 file will simply look better. 

Bitrate is also important because for streaming video, the bitrate of the video is equal to the amount of bandwidth required in order to show a video without pre-buffering or jitter – especially important for live applications like teleconferencing.  Lowering the bitrate decreases the quality, but image fidelity is often less important than immediate response time in teleconferencing applications.  (There are other issues that can cause jitter even with sufficient bandwidth, so it pays to monitor your communications network.)

At any rate, I hope you find this information useful when dealing with bandwidth.  At least now, when someone complains about how long it takes to download a video file, instead of spending tons of time and energy on network upgrades, you might want to ask if you can get a lower bitrate file instead. 

Network World’s Steve Taylor and Larry Hettick ended up talking to the CEO and Senior VP for Marketing of Vidyo, a company that makes high definition teleconferencing solutions. Vidyo’s differentiation? It uses the Internet.

This wouldn’t be such a big deal - Skype has had video capabilities for three years now – except that in the corporate environment, it eliminates the need for network capacity dedicated directly to teleconferencing, and allows desktop users – even ones connected to the network via VPN - to join in the conversation instead of relying on specialized rooms dedicated to teleconferencing, where network throughput can be controlled and limited.

That’s all well and fine, except that there is a tradeoff. (There is always a tradeoff.)

Vidyo’s solution uses scalable video coding, which, in essence, means that when networks become oversubscribed, the teleconference app will lower the bitrate of the video on the fly. This can cut down on problems due to lack of capacity, and as such, it can prevent some latency due to oversubscription, but it does not address latency problems directly. Additionally, latency is less predictable in Internet-based apps than apps that run on private networks.

Videoconferencing, of course, is notoriously susceptible to latency and jitter problems.

Still, having a little stuttering is better than having no videoconferencing capabilities at all, and a solution like Vidyo’s brings teleconferencing to more endpoints, cheaper. If performance, rather than extensibility, is of utmost concern, you’re probably looking at something more traditional in a teleconferencing solution.

Whatever the teleconferencing solution, however, networks need to be monitored to preserve telecommunications performance and to make sure that teleconferencing applications do not take vital resources away from business critical applications.

Part 3: Killing Your Financial Performance… and your company’s performance.

Time Warner can bring out the argument that, under data-capped plans you only pay “extra” for data “over the cap.” The problem is that every single one of Time Warner's plans require you to “buy” that cap of data with your monthly fee.

Since every single monthly fee that Time Warner has come out with (so far) costs around the same $1 per gigabyte for under-the-cap gigs. For some plans, (such as the $30 ten-gig plan, or $15 one-gig plan) it’s much more. For the “60 gigs for $55” plan, it’s slightly less. But for every gig you download, you pay, whether you go over the cap or you don't. How much will that cost?

Well, to simplify things, let’s take a look at the overage rate of $1/GB – only the top tier, at $0.91/gig , is cheaper, and even then, you’re saving maybe 5 dollars for the month over a flat $1/GB rate.

• Idling for One Month: $2.04
  
  Yep, I actually checked, when I had the computer running there, with nothing else going on, no AIM, no Skype, nothing coming in or out of my LAN other than the statistics my router was sending me, I was still using up 485kB over 10 minutes. Extrapolating this out, I get 2.04 GB. I can assume that I'm being bombarded by all sorts of neat little packets containing all sorts of things I don't want. All of which, I'd have to pay for under Time Warner's plan.
  Keep in mind, Time Warner's lowest plan is 1GB, with a $2/GB overage rate. I’m not even sure I can avoid this “usage” by turning off the cable modem when I wasn't using it, because Time Warner measures the traffic at their end.
  
  
• Downloading “Twilight” (HD) from the AppleTV store: $3.80
  
  (I thought that it was pretty appropriate to use a vampire movie to illustrate my point about Time Warner's new pricing plan.)
  
  It should be noted that renting HD version of the movie itself only costs $4.99. At a total cost of $8.79, you might spend $2 on gas getting to Blockbuster and still come out ahead.
  
  Which brings me to an interesting point – Apple’s major overhead cost for the iTunes store is bandwidth. I can't imagine that Apple is paying anywhere near $3.80 in data transfer fees, as that would leave them with only $1.19 in profit before splitting it with the content distributors.
  
  
• Downloading Season 1 of Friday Night Lights (A source of Austin Pride): $30.86
  
  It should be noted that Friday Night Lights is a source of much of Austin's creative community's income and future career positioning – Austin Mayoral Candidata Brewster McCracken specifically mentioned Friday Night Lights in his statement on the data caps. The HD season costs $65.78 – this would add $30.86 to that bill.
  
  
• Watching “Young Frankenstein” on Netflix Instant: $1.26
  
  This would absolutely be one of the competitive, promising services killed off, as the cost of mailing the DVD out is certainly less than the cost of downloading it would be. Netflix Instant is free to Netflix subscribers.
  
  
• Watching an episode of “The Daily Show” from ComedyCentral.com: $0.20
  
  
• Watching an episode of “Survivor” on CBS.com: $0.49
  
  This includes the cost of the commercials that they were running, which included, ironically enough, commercials about watching March Madness Online at the Office.
  
  
• Watching a March Madness Game: $0.28
  
  Yep, it's online now. Oddly enough, the video quality for March Madness was lower than that of Survivor... but as I don't watch sports anyway, who cares.
  
  
• Downloading “Where the Wild Things Are” Trailer: $0.15
  
  Not much, but who goes to Apple's trailer site to watch ONE trailer? And if it's something cool, like “Star Trek” (2009) aren’t you going to see it more than once?
  
  
• YouTube High Definition Video (7m11s): $0.11
  
  Again, YouTube is providing a great way for people to become active creators instead of passive consumers. When a third party charges for something the first party created and the second party wants, it limits the audience and stifles growth.
  
  
• Downloading the back catalogue of a video podcast (Comedy Central's Stand Up Podcast): $1.13
  
  These video podcasts are free to download, though they serve a purpose – the idea is that you watch the podcast, want more, and tune in to Comedy Central’s programming.  Under a data cap, it severely alters the new media marketing plan of just about every company.
  
  If everyone had to pay a surcharge for the data as well as bandwidth, there wouldn’t be any demand for “new media communications specialists” because we’ll all be forced back into using the old media – the old media that we “loved” so much that we abandoned it en masse the instant a better alternative became available.  


• Watching Live Breaking News (Obama's DNC Speech used as example): $1.11
  
  
• Downloading Service Pack 1 for Vista: $0.45
  
  Hobson's choice: Skip an update and risk infection, or leave Windows updates on, and pay more for it? Oh, and if you think you’re immune to infection because you run Linux…
  
  
• BitTorrenting Ubuntu: $0.65 + ($.065 x your share ratio)
  
  A 1:1 share ratio would cost $1.30 – still cheaper than Windows, but not “free.”
  
  
• Gaming:
  
  
  
  • Downloading the latest nVidia graphics card drivers: $0.07 
  • Downloading Half Life 2 from Steam: $0.94
    
  • Patching Battlefield 2: $0.55 
  • One Hour of Team Fortress 2 gaming online w/Voice: $0.09
    
  
  
• Sending an 8GB SD card worth of digital photos to Grandma: $8.00
  
  “Yes, Mom, I'd love to send you photos of your grandson... but... it's so expensive...”
  
  
• Getting Rickrolled: $0.01…
  
  …per rickroll.
  
  Rick Astley only clocks in at 10MB... but Rick's been out there over 19 million times. It adds up. 
  
  
• Video calling my sister via Skype: $0.88
  
  I had a great 2 hour conversation with my sister on Saturday when I was sick. She showed me her fan-translations of Japanese comics and we talked about what she's going to do when she gets her certificate, her plans for her future, it was a great time. She also made fun of me gargling Chloraseptic when I had forgot to mute my headphones, and made fun of me gargling Chloraseptic when I did mute my headphones but still had the webcam on. Ah, great times.

You know, I think it's absolutely ironic that Time Warner didn't learn any lessons from the fact that they were able to storm into the telephone business because they eliminated the exorbitant fees for long distance telephone calling with “cable phone service.” Of course, that may be the idea – there's nothing technologically separating Time Warner's cable telephone service from a service like Vonage, except that you would have to pay for every gigabyte on that Vonage phone – while Time Warner's phone wouldn't have any charges associated with it.

All of a sudden, this thorny “pricing” issue becomes a thorny “Net Neutrality” issue...

Maybe some of these sub-dollar prices look reasonable to you… except that you previously got them for free.  And when people have to pay for what they previously got for free, they’ll find a way around that.

So instead of waiting until they get home to watch that March Madness game, or that YouTube clip, or that Daily Show episode, they’ll do it at work, instead.  And unlike on a Time Warner connection, there really is congestion difficulty on corporate networks. 

You think recreational traffic is bad now…

But ultimately, I think this is a case where Time Warner simply has not learned from history.  We already looked at how the last major service to charge based on usage is a shadow of its former self and eventually abandoned that business model, and how an “@aol.com” e-mail address on a business card went, in the early 90s, from being seen as a go-getting trendsetter to being a laughingstock.  And we saw how Time Warner and other cable companies were able to battle entrenched phone service monopolies by eliminating rated service for long-distance calling for a flat rate. 

But there’s more to it.  When you put a third party price on it, a “Time Warner Tax,” if you will, the thought of doing some of these things – things that have been changing our lives, our economy, and our culture, from one of passive consumers to creators and producers, well... it reminds me of a specific point in history. 

That is, there was once a time in America where every official communication, every official piece of business, every record – required that an onerous surcharge be applied, a tax levied by a distant, monolithic monopoly with no concern for those affected. It negatively affected merchants, manufacturers, printers, lawyers and anyone who needed to work with legal documents. The justifications were also similar to the arguments by Time Warner today – that is, that the tax was “the most easy and least objectionable” way of raising the money, and that alternatives were considered but rejected.

This was the “Stamp Act of 1765.” Opposition to it was so widespread and heartfelt that, well, one thing lead to another, and eventually we waved bye-bye to King George III.

And that's what it comes down to. The move by Time Warner to attempt to use this pricing scheme flies in the face of history. Anybody who legitimately needs broadband service and has the ability to switch to a different provider will do so when they get that first bill.  In short, Time Warner is getting out of the broadband business. 

They’re just doing it in the most money-draining way possible. 

By Jeff Hicks

I recently attended VoiceCon and noticed a few trends there – who knows how they'll pan out, but here are some notes from the event.

First, Video conferencing had a very large presence at the event. Many companies are either selling or deploying solutions to save on travel and enable collaboration. Management for these solutions is in it's infancy, but it's clear that it will be needed, because right now, the stop-gap solution seems to be throwing bandwidth at it. Desktop video is going to cause major network issues as it rolls out, just as VoIP caused major issues before it.

Second, there were several Voice Management sessions. It's pretty clear that there's no longer a question about the need to manage networked communications. Many companies are taking a proactive approach with planning and management ahead of the deployment, and the need for Quality of Experience and network performance management, combined, is seen as necessary for true Unified Communications management. In fact, several sessions focused on UC management – those sessions had very good attendance and interest.

Finally, I found the Microsoft keynote really interesting. Microsoft compared the desktop phone to the “Brother Word Processor” devices, and doomed to the same fate. Microsoft proposed to the audience that eventually they will have to make a choice between spending $300 on a single function desktop phone on $300 on a multifunctional computer which runs a soft-phone communicator application. Microsoft's argument is that desktop phones are archaic and outdated.

A fair point, but the one thing about multi-function computers is that one bad program can bring down the whole bunch. Considering how important the phone is to business, it may be that people are willing to pay a price premium for the reliability that comes with a single-function device. Or not. Who knows?

Jeff Hicks is principal technical staff, working primarily in Unified Communications, at NetQoS.

The latest rumors, reported in Techcrunch and other places, imply strongly that Cisco is in talks to buy PureDigital, makers of those little flash-based “Flip” mini-cams. I own three of them myself, but that’s because I like to do things like suction cup them to cars, duct tape them to my helmet while sliding down a 45mph luge, ride with them in a human-sized hamster ball, etc.

The interesting thing about this acquisition is that the Flip camera has greatly simplified the ability for the average user to record and capture high definition video for uploading to YouTube and other sites. Lots of people are doing exactly that – and that’s a lot of bandwidth traveling across the Internet.

Cisco’s interest in Pure Digital may seem a mismatch – Cisco is known as a networking company, where the Flip is a consumer gadget. On the other hand, the Flip is a high-bandwidth gadget – and Cisco can stimulate the demand for its networking hardware and software by stimulating the supply of high-bandwidth applications.

Cisco CEO John Chambers has been aggressively pushing into the consumer space, with some enterprise technologies, such as Telepresence, almost tailor made for the consumer market – assuming you can get the economies of scale to work. Cisco also has a digital media network-attached storage device. The key, it seems, is to get more people using the network and more information on the network in order to feed the need for networking devices. Not so much a “razor and blades” model as a “stubble-growth serum and razor” model.

Of course, Cisco has also bought the consumer-router brand Linksys in 2003, and Scientific Atlanta in 2005. Scientific Atlanta deals mostly in set-tops, cable modems, and digital interactive subscriber systems for VideoIP and VoIP.

We just announced that NetQoS Unified Communication Monitor works with Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 Release 2 [OCS 07 R2] this morning, and while it’s easy to get into the small details of how unified communications applications place great demands on the network, and how to handle those demands, I found myself pausing for a moment.

Where, exactly, are we going with this?

And by “we,” I don’t just mean NetQoS as a company but I mean – Us. The big Us. The human condition.

That is, unified communications applications do place more demands on the network than any other type of data that’s come before it. So, why then, do we even do it in the first place?

It’s because treating voice and video as data to be sent over the network allows us to do more with the communication-as-data than we could with the analog alternatives, even if this makes the network as a whole slightly less effective due to congestion – or if you have good performance monitoring information perhaps no less effective, but perhaps more complex. (We try to simplify the complexity as best we can, by using metrics directly from OCS 07 R2, but the necessities of a mixed communications and data network are simply more complex than the needs of a pure data network alone.)

Everything is becoming binary data, and this process is not likely to stop. To those of earlier generations, the New York Times is a newspaper; to many of the young, the New York Times is a news Web page with video and audio content; text and images being one of many offerings possible. A back-of-the-envelope calculation shows that it would be cheaper, over the course of a year’s subscription, to send every New York Times subscriber a free Kindle E-book reader – at retail prices, no less – and send the newspaper to them digitally, than it costs to print out and deliver all those physical papers to the subscribers.

It doesn’t take long to realize three things: Technology is getting cheaper, paper and distribution is getting more expensive, and the market of people who read the New York Times but will only do so if they have a physical piece of paper are dying out. The Grey Lady will become data, or there will be no Grey Lady.

Every advantage of the physical paper - portability, permanency, and simplicity, is being lost as technology becomes more portable, more permanent, and simpler. Our standards for digital technology to replace the more traditional equivalent are relatively low. Assuming it takes two and a half seconds to locate an article by flipping through the pages, any system that can serve up a Web page in less than 2500ms is an improvement. Even the sheer scale involved – that you would measure the time it would take to find an article in milliseconds rather than seconds – implies an entire quantum leap from the old way of doing things.

Those of us who work closely with the Web – bloggers, Web designers, media professionals – are aware of CSS, which removes content from layout, and RSS, which removes content from context. How far can we be from a society in which all content is completely removed from any sort of context or layout? A society where everything is abstracted? Where you could download the model of a basketball, and print it out on a 3D printer. Or even, if you wish, have the New York Times printed daily on a basketball, if you so chose…

But in that world, where everything is data, network performance suddenly becomes one of the most important things in the world. The bottlenecks once caused by the unfortunate limitations of pure physics suddenly give way to a single bottleneck – that of network performance.

Digitization is an awesome and powerful force… and while it has been mostly beneficial, I think that too often we do not recognize the power of this inexorable tide – this benevolent but gargantuan inevitability.

I don’t know if I’m ready for that world. I’m not sure I want my news to bounce.

The inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44^th President of the United States will occur on Tuesday, Jan. 20^th, at 12PM Eastern Standard Time. 

This, you may have noticed, is smack dab in the middle of the workday.  Streaming video problems, anyone?  

The last time we had a presidential inauguration, it was January 2005.  YouTube didn’t get started until February 2005.  In contrast, this looks like it’s going to be rather well watched.  For one, Obama’s a new President – back in 2005, the inauguration was the re-establishment of the status quo. Second, even some of Obama’s harshest critics (and here I’ll specifically mention Pat Buchanan) have raved about the quality of his speechwriting and speech delivery. 

And there’s the whole “history being made” aspect of it, you know.  Not only is Obama the first black president, he seems to be the first geek president.  He uses a Blackberry, has answered questions about sorting algorithms at Google, plans to establish a cabinet level CTO position, uses YouTube to broadcast the President’s Weekly Address, has had Lawrence Lessig as a campaign advisor, and plans to use open standards to increase government information transparency.

He’s also joked about being the “son of Krypton,” posed in front of a Superman statue, gave Leonard Nimoy the Vulcan Salute, and he’s on the cover of Amazing Spider Man #583.

So a heck of a lot of geeks will be tuning in as well; though the phrase “tuning in” when dealing with using the Internet is a bit of an anachronism.  There are over a dozen choices as to where to tune in – Hulu even has a countdown clock. 

The problem is that videos transmitted over-the-air are transmitted once – being picked up by 5 or 5 million viewers doesn’t change the cost of transmitting or receiving the information.  On the Internet, the amount of bandwidth consumed is equal to the amount of bandwidth per video multiplied by the number of viewers. 

You could probably rig something up using live caching of the video so that traffic remains on the LAN instead of the more expensive, lower-bandwidth WAN links, or change the QoS policies around to throttle back streaming video traffic to a reasonable amount on Tuesday.

But my advice?  Buy a TV.  Set it up in the breakroom.  Let people who want to watch it come in to watch. 

Get everyone to throw in a few bucks for lunch (on the East Coast) or breakfast (on the West Coast) or brunch (Central and Mountain) and you’ve turned a potential network performance problem into a team-building event.