After nearly 800,000 people watched an Internet live stream of the United States' 5-2 victory over the Czech Republic on Wednesday in men's ice hockey at the Winter Olympics, NBC officials began to wonder how many more would stream the U.S.-Canada semifinal Friday.
'We're talking about a premier event going on at 12 noon Eastern, with the West Coast awake, too,' said Rick Cordella, senior vice president and general manager for digital at the NBC Sports Group. 'It'll be big, but I don't know how big.'
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NBC officials said they believed the network had the infrastructure to deal with a huge number of streams. On Wednesday from noon to 2 p.m., Eastern, there were about 1 million live streams from Sochi, Russia, to the United States - 798,337 for the U.S.-Czech Republic game and the remainder for figure skating and other events.
The concern at NBC is whether too many people streaming the U.S.-Canada game at work will overload their office networks, which could slow the stream and hurt its video quality, or even impede an office's overall ability to work online. 'A network IT guy says, how much can our network handle at any particular moment?' Cordella said. 'If everyone in your building streamed at the same time, you'd have problems.'
Still, he said, with a massive stream, the problems are likely to be localized, affecting smaller companies rather than larger ones.
'There's a low percentage of there being a problem,' he said.
In Finland, there have been warnings to ask people to reduce their streaming of the Sochi Games because it was using up too much bandwidth. And two years ago, the chief technology officer for the city of Los Angeles sent an email to City Hall employees telling them to stop streaming events of the Summer Games in London because it was affecting the city's digital operations.
Cordella said that he was not issuing NBC's equivalent of a Y2K warning. But he said that Friday would present an unusual situation for a major sports event. The game will begin at midday, with all time zones in the continental United States fully engaged. And people at work usually do not have access to a television - the game will be broadcast live on NBCSN - but NBC's live streams are easily available to authenticated users.
A game like U.S.-Canada will attract not only hockey fans, but also casual fans interested in the spectacle. NBC said Wednesday's U.S.-Czech Republic game was the second-most streamed sporting event in NBC Sports history, after the 2.1 million for Super Bowl XLVI in February 2012. But that was an evening event and users were not clustered in office buildings.
'We believe we're ready to handle this,' Cordella said. 'But we're up against something a lot of people haven't seen before. It's hard to prepare for a record-breaking stream.'
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