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NetAid Benefit Faces Technological Challenge- Global Policy Forum- NGOs NetAid Benefit Faces Technological Challenge
By Chris O'Brien
Mercury News
October 8, 1999
There will be plenty of stars performing at Saturday's NetAid benefit: Sting, Jewel, Puff Daddy. And Marty Kagan. Kagan, 29, works for Cisco Systems Inc. of San Jose, which is billing its NetAid concert as the largest event ever to take place over the Internet. Officially, the 10-hour concert is a fundraiser for world poverty programs. But it's also a showcase for Cisco's latest Internet technology -- a chance for the world's largest maker of computer networking equipment to prove that the Net can be just as reliable as television or the telephone system. And Marty Kagan is the man who is supposed to make sure it goes off without a crash. Cisco, the world's largest maker of computer networking equipment and the prime sponsor of NetAid, has placed Kagan in charge of the NetAid Web site, which will transmit live video from the concert over the Internet to as many as 120,000 simultaneous viewers. It would be a choice job, except for one problem: Recent attempts to broadcast live events on the Net have generally resulted in disaster.
In February, an online fashion show by the Victoria's Secret lingerie chain drew overwhelming response from viewers -- but most of them got stuck with jerky pictures and sound or weren't able to connect at all. Attempts to show the recent Woodstock concert over the Internet also produced garbled video and sound. These high-profile bellyflops have fed the perception that computer networks -- especially the Internet -- aren't as reliable as more traditional networks like the telephone system. Cisco, which wants to sell equipment to put video and phone calls on the Internet, disagrees with this notion. With NetAid, the company has decided to put its routers where its mouth is. If the Webcast succeeds, Cisco will be able to brag that it can do the same for its customers, and consumers may see their options to view Webcasts multiply. And if it fails? ``Obviously, if the whole thing flops because the technology breaks down, they're going to look bad,'' said Lloyd Taylor, vice president of Keynote Systems, a San Mateo company that monitors the performance of Web sites. ``But this is a big chance to finally prove this concept works.''
NetAid.org is a partnership between Cisco and the United Nations Development Program to raise money to fight poverty while educating people. Cisco has spent $10 million to stage the concerts and donated another $10 million directly to the charity. Cisco insists that its main focus Saturday will be on promoting the new charity. Cisco hopes that the Web site, www.netaid.org, will become a giant portal for linking people who need help with those who can provide it. Modeled after Live Aid, a series of concerts held in 1985 to raise money to fight hunger in Africa, the concerts on Saturday are an attempt to raise money for charity while publicizing the poverty portal. From 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. PDT, musical acts will perform on stages in London, Geneva and New Jersey. Radio and TV will broadcast the event around the world, with cable channel VH1 showing it on a three-hour delay in the Bay Area. The total audience is expected to be in the hundreds of millions.
More significantly for Cisco, the company says up to 125,000 simultaneous visitors will be able to watch the concert over the Internet in live streaming video. Anyone with a regular old modem and basic PC should be able to tune in. The company predicts it will get 60 million hits every hour -- 10 times as many as the most recent Olympics drew. But only a small fraction of those users will watch the online video broadcast. Kagan knows the results will be closely watched throughout the networking industry. ``It's a chance to show it's ready for prime time,'' Kagan said. Kagan is an unlikely choice to be running such an event for Cisco. Two years ago, he was teaching history and sociology in Santa Barbara while designing Web sites on the side. After joining Cisco to design Web interfaces for some products, he moved from project to project until he landed his current role this summer as program manager for NetAid.
Before starting on NetAid, Kagan studied past Webcasting efforts. The problem wasn't with the hardware or software being used, he found. Instead, it was the fact that the computers distributing the video were all located in one place, which meant that hundreds of thousands of users were trying to get the video through a few access points. It was like inviting a huge crowd to a movie and then squeezing them all through one turnstile.
Cisco's solution is to essentially show the video at more movie theaters and build more turnstiles. The online broadcast will work as follows: TV cameras at the stage in, say, New York, will capture the performance. Camera crews have been instructed not to pan the cameras quickly because that can make the online video even more jittery. The video will be beamed to a satellite, which will relay it to the Seattle headquarters of RealNetworks Inc., a maker of Webcasting software. Engineers at RealNetworks will digitize the video and send it to 50 data centers around the globe that are owned by Akamai Technologies, a Web hosting company based in Cambridge, Mass. Each data center has seven Web servers that will split the video signal into 357 separate streams. Viewers clicking on the Web site will connect to Cisco's ``war room'' in San Jose, where a device called a distributed director will steer them to the nearest data center to get the video feed. To prevent an overload, Cisco has capped the number of online viewers for the video. Once all 125,000 streams are being used, the network will tell anyone else who wants to watch the video, ``Sorry! It looks like the virtual stadium is full.''
Because there will be 50 places to get the video stream, Kagan believes NetAid won't experience the bottlenecks that have hampered other online broadcasts. Furthermore, the large number of centers and their geographic distribution will make it difficult for hackers or a glitch at one server to crash the whole broadcast. While Kagan acknowledges he'll be holding his breath on Saturday, he believes this system is solid and will become the model for future online events. ``You don't have congestion in one spot, and you minimize your risk,'' Kagan said. ``We could blow up half the western United States and we'd still be up.''
Several analysts familiar with the design seemed confident that Cisco will be successful. ``The company sees this as a chance to push the technological envelope,'' said John Armstrong, chief analyst for Dataquest. ``I'm sure they're very conscious of the failures. But if anybody has the ability to get this right, it's Cisco.'' If not, Saturday will be the longest day of Kagan's life as he and a team of 30 Cisco engineers sit in the war room trying to troubleshoot the problems. Despite a recent run of 24-hour work days getting ready, Kagan doesn't seem to regret leaving his last project at Cisco to take on NetAid. "People thought I was crazy,'' he said. ``I gave up a safe job for a high-risk, short-term project. But hey, I'm young, I can always go back to teaching.''
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