Boring but important. The title of this post is the answer to the question "Why the olympics didn't melt the internet" Apparently sports fans world wide have been enjoying high quality video of the olympics delivered to their computers by the internet.
This is in contrast to the usual experience of chunky graphics and long pauses I usually get when watching video on my computer.
The technical details of how the olympics is broadcast is here . Essentially the video doesn't use the internet but is squirted directly into your Internet Service Provider (ISP). In the U.K where people have been forecasting that TV broadcasting will bring the internet to its knees this technology looks attractive. Not least because the ISPs will be able to attach a meter to these feeds and can impersonate a pay per view broadcast service. This will make your ISP very happy and will make me happy too. By keeping all this stuff out of the way it should make my surfing experience more enjoyable. I have my suspicions that it will just reveal a new bottleneck with the ISPs hardware. In my experience advances in computing always ends up as a faster way of rushing from one queue to another
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