Call me psychic but I’m pretty sure you’ll all be aware of the royal wedding taking place on Friday morning. Prince William and Kate Middleton are getting married, and the event is being streamed live online. Will the Internet be able to cope?
Kate and William Royal Wedding
Prince William of Wales is marrying Kate Middleton (officially known as Catherine) on Friday April 29 in a ceremony set to begin at 10 am BST and last until around 2pm BST. Whether you personally are interested in seeing the nuptials taking place and all the surrounding hubbub, a significant proportion of the population is.
Hundreds of television channels around the world are showing the royal wedding live, but the event is also being streamed in full online. The official YouTube channel of the Royal Family is hosting the full ceremony, as is the NDN, and any other website which has paid the asking price to embed the feed.
In all, around 2 billion people are expected to watch the royal wedding between William and Kate, with 400 million of those estimated to be doing so on the Web. Which begs the question: Will the Internet with the bandwidth demands?
Bandwidth Demands
The last big online video broadcast which taxed the Internet was the inauguration of President Obama in 2009. That saw 70 million people tune in from the U.S., and an estimated 200 million worldwide. the royal wedding between Kate and Wills is set to at least double that, and those estimates may be exceeded quite easily.
Local congestion is likely to be fierce, as people in offices combine to strain their network. Unless their boss is feeling generous and lets them watch it on broadcast television instead.
Next up the chain is YouTube itself. This will be the biggest test for YouTube’s capacity to deliver live video streams to date, but Google is unlikely to have taken any chances; instead it will be very confident it has devoted enough resources to delivering the event to as many people as tune in.
Lastly there’s the wider Internet. Other websites, especially social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, will be hit by increased numbers of users as people pass their thoughts on what is happening. Therefore outages could be a common sight across the day.
Conclusions
I sincerely hope the Internet copes with the demand. If it doesn’t then it will dent the confidence of many as to how feasible it is that the Internet will become the primary delivery method of content in the years to come. It’ll also mean many of us have to watch the edited highlights of the royal wedding after it’s all over and done with. Calamitous, I’m sure you’ll agree.
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