April 11, 2003

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In the months leading up to the Iraqi conflict, staff at leading news sites were scrambling to put in place preparations for the expected surge in traffic. "Unlike 9/11, we knew this was coming and we knew it was going to be very large. So we had time to prepare and we had everything set up and ready to go." said David Mahlum, operations manager for MSNBC.

Given that the role of online news has continued to grow since 9/11, it was clear that the performance of news sites during this new conflict would come under close scrutiny. The general media quickly declared this a watershed moment. Last week, the New York Times declared, “…the sudden surge in wartime demand for online news has become a pivotal test of the potential of high-speed Internet connections, both to attract users to online media outlets and to persuade them to pay for the material they find there…”.

Pivotal indeed. The Times and others are drawing their excitement primarily from increased audience numbers. On that front, plenty of statistics are available - Comscore reported that the top 7 news sites have seen a 70% increase comparing March 20 with the prior month and ABCNews reported a tripling in the number of video streams comparing that week with the prior week. Those figures are certainly important, as is the accompanying increase in mind share for streaming video. But for streaming industry insiders, the question of quantity is just as important as quality.

A number of new traffic-coping strategies have been put in place for the war. For one, overflow arrangements are now standard operating procedure. Bill Wheaton, Director of Streaming for Akamai, which handled overflow for a number of major news sites, said efforts to prepare for the war started very early and added “We put in place additional capacity and worked with our customers to fortify their sites to withstand the pressure of extremely high traffic."

Another strategy was to lower encoding rates. MSNBC’s Mahlum said, “For on-demand content we changed from 56/100k MBR streams to single-bitrate 56k streams. We watch our numbers closely, monitor the servers and switch accordingly."

So did it all work? Objective numbers from Streamcheck can shed some light on this question.