Streaming U2 live across the Internet

Streaming U2 live across the Internet / Apr 2002

After the Mars Polar Lander crashed, I took a job at NetApp working as the product architect for NetCache. Among the hundreds of deployments that I help setup across the world, the most fun was figuring out how to scale one of the biggest bands in the world at the time wanting to stream their concert live to a global audience.

To pull this off, I moved to Sardinia where Tiscali was based, and worked with their team to integrate new support we added to NetCache for the RealPlayer RTSP protocol and extensions. The concert ended up reaching a global audience of 5 million viewers (huge at the time for streaming video across the Internet!) and eventually well over 30 million watched the archived version.

I wrote up a technical report at NetApp on setting up the CDN for the live streaming, which was picked up by a number of other streaming companies in the next few years.

# 1st Apr 2002 / caching, distributed, internet, italy, netapp, streaming