I have just finished reading your Streaming Media Bible and was most pleased to see such a collection of information finally available in one easily accessible and well written book. Thank you.

There were many things in the book which confirmed decisions I have made and advice I have given to customers and colleagues alike. More importantly, it provided me with the insight of someone who has grappled with and solved many of the same problems I have encountered in streaming and so much more.

The reason I write however, is to tell you how much I enjoyed reading one section in particular: The Summary of "A Large-Scale Event - U2 live from Notre Dame". I found myself shaking my head and exclaming "Yes!! Exactly!!" for virtually every point you made. In May of 2001 my company, FollowYourStars AG, produced and directed a series of live events for T-Online (The ISP for German Telekom) and I thought you might find our experience interesting.

The format was to follow stars (in this case several German pop stars Sasha and Echt) in their daily lives for 3 consecutive days eight hours each day with two rebroadcasts each day. We used converted wireless Sony DV cameras (using digital senders which fit into backpacks on the cameramens' backs) to allow us the mobility needed to follow into areas where we would normally lose analogue signals - buildings, etc. We placed a SNG satellite van nearby uploaded via satellite (using DeutscheTelekom)a video signal to our hosters. There we had a satellite receivers and video splitter connected to our encoders (Real only) and streaming servers(redundant). Our streaming server sent its six streams (three views x two encoding speeds) to Deutsche Telekom which allegedly had a Real distribution system in place to "handle up to 30.000 concurrent streams".

Everything worked properly with our signal from camera to streaming server both in tests and in the live event. Deutsche Telekom, however, for reasons only known to them did not believe the events from T-Online would draw many viewers allocated only three edge/caching servers for the event - all in Stuttgart - and each with a 1000 user license limit. After the first ten minutes of the first event I started receiving calls from people I had asked to watch from various locations around Europe telling me that they were receiving messages - "The Server has reached it's capacity and can serve no more streams". Or the German or French equivalent.

Our CEO had the foresight to force the inclusion of a technical person in most meetings so we were able to elimate many "marketing imposed features" like the split images which would be clickable - though I think we would have found a way to solve that one in the end.

I had a company called SURVER in Hamburg write the SMIL code - You were correct, a much better option if for the simple reason that I was able to force advertisering into the embedded player and even when someone opted for full-screen, the advertising stayed. This was a necessity for sales.

One problem we encountered was reporting. For the first event DT came back to me with numbers saying that 25-100 people had viewed the event simultaneously. The WebTrends number suggested something a bit higher. I also noted that WebTrends listed almost all Real viewers as viewing for exaclty 1 minute - a few longer, none shorter. This aroused some suspicion. I finally determined that the main streaming server outside Frankfurt would determine the location of the client and pass the stream to the an edge server (therefore the 1 minute listening times), and the RealAdmin count would only inlcude the streams connected directly to the primary server or those streams connecting the primary server to the edge servers (about 35 total).

We (the programmers at our hosting company Integra - now Genuity) wrote a dirty C program which sat on the servers and collected data for everyone who logged in to view the event and counted how many per half hour. I estimated that during the second event we received between 3500 and 4000 simultaneous viewers and a total of almost 100,000 (from WebTrends). This was later confirmed when DT sent me all the log files from the edge servers as well as the primary.

I fully concur with your statement "Never, ever let anyone else control the access to your servers." If only ...

In any case, I enjoyed your book very much, found it both entertaining and useful. I have included it in my own reference library and will happily recommend it to others working in the field.

If you ever find yourself in France or Germany, please let me know, I would enjoy meeting you.

Yours,

Peter CARON