How Streaming Works,
And Why To Not Do It Yourself

A Simple Analogy

Let’s say you are giving a concert on your own private island. The island connects to the mainland by a narrow footbridge. When the concert starts, only as many people that can make it across the footbridge can get onto the island to hear the concert. Without pushing that analogy too far, that’s the general idea. You have a narrow network pipe going to your home or business, and that pipe will only accommodate a small number of simultaneous visitors. The solution is to transmit your material to SurferNETWORK and let your visitors listen or view your material from our data center (where we have a gargantuan network pipe).

Doing It Yourself

To be a bit more scientific about it, let’s say that your Internet connection is by DSL, Cable modem, or T1. DSL and Cable modem services are typically provided to residences for about $50/month. T1 is the standard service offering for businesses, and typically costs $600-800 a month. T1 normally is 1.5Mbps (Mega bits per second) in both directions. DSL and cable, on the other hand, are asymmetric, having a much greater capacity when you download material compared to when you send material. Both services commonly offer about the same download speed as a T1, but only a small fraction of that speed in the upload (sending) direction. If visitors connect to your web site across one of these links, the number of visitors who can connect is limited by your upload speed (you are uploading to them). Let’s say, for example, that your upload speed is 256,000 bits per second. And, let’s say that you are playing a standard data rate video connection of 100 kbps (kilo bits per second). 100 kbps is 100,000 bits per second, your capacity is 256,000 bits per second, and therefore, only two visitors can connect at the same time. If you were playing audio at 30,000 bps then the theoretical maximum number of concurrent listeners is about eight. But from a practical aspect you can never reach anywhere close to the theoretical maximum. You might actually only be able to support four or five concurrent listeners.

It’s a bit better on a corporate T1, but the same rules apply. And here’s the rule: take half the upload speed of your network connection, add ten percent overhead to the data rate of your material, and then divide your net upload speed by the data rate plus overhead. Therefore, a T1 will support at best about 7 concurrent viewers or about twenty concurrent listeners. But, that completely maxes out your line, so if the line is used for any other purpose you risk stalling or stopping that other traffic. Conversely, any other traffic on the line diminishes your media carrying capacity.

An even greater problem is that you can’t control how many visitors will come at once, and if too many come at the same time, everyone gets a bad experience. Packets collide, get delayed or dropped, and the visitors’ players start to rebuffer. Eventually, as your line gets above  50% capacity, all of your visitors get jerky, interrupted feeds with constant rebuffering. And, you don’t know. There isn’t any ready way for you to tell whether they are getting a perfect and enjoyable listening or viewing experience, or an unpleasant one.

Of course, you can get higher speed circuits than T1 lines, but for thousands of dollars a month. And, even if you did, you still have the same type of limits. If you advertised your concert and attracted many visitors, all of them would get a bad experience.

The Better Way

The better way is to provide us with your material, either by providing files to us, of connecting a single upload feed from you to our data center. When visitors to your web site click to access media content, they are redirected to us (they don’t know it). Because we sit on the Internet backbone (the Internet superhighway), we can support many thousands of concurrent listeners or viewers. In fact, whereas, for example, a T1 connection provides a data rate of 1,544,000 bits per second, our data center servers have a capacity of multiple times 1,000,000,000,000 bits per second (and if we wanted or needed more, there is virtually no limit on the amount of network capacity available to us).