exploremusic

Forget for a moment your personal feelings about U2 because last night’s YouTube gig wasn’t so much about them as it was for YouTube.  And for them, it was a technological triumph.

As far as U2 was concerned, this was just another gig involving extra media.  They’re used to playing to both tens of thousands of people and video cameras at the same time.  No, this was about the demonstrating power of YouTube’s infrastructure and a chance for Google—YouTube’s owners—to gather serious amounts of data.

First, YouTube.  The event began at 11:30 ET  (8:30pm in LA, 3:30am in Dublin/London, 12:30pm in Tokyo) with a 30 minute pre-roll countdown featuring  live shots of the crowd at the Rose Bowl interspersed with pre-recording bits with the band (the one where The Edge gets confused with YouTube/U2 was rather funny). 

According to a little button on the player, I was getting the stream at 1000 kbps, which fellow Twitter dude, Joseph D, says probably involved YouTube detecting the average kilobytes per second capabilities of each user as they signed on and then slotting everyone into a bitrate category.  (Another Twitter dude says he was restricted to 200 kpbs because his Internet connection came via a tethered Blackberry.) 

Akamai sent out multiple streams to servers around the world.  From what Joseph could tell me, each person watching the event was hooked into the closest Akamai server, which then combined multiple streams into one seamless stream to avoid blips and jerks.  Sounds a lot like BitTorrent-style technology to me.

To me, this was one of those situations where a sufficiently advanced technology was completely indistinguishable from magic.  Given the worldwide scope of this event and the vast number of U2 fans hitting YouTube, I kept watching for the whole thing to crash.  But as users piled on, the stream stayed steady.  In other words, it scaled beautifully.

[Check back for part 2]