Now that the House Judiciary Committee has voted to release the videotape of President Clinton's grand jury testimony, the heavy load of video traffic could be the biggest test yet for the Internet's infrastructure.
Last week, Congress voted to release the text of independent counsel Kenneth Starr's report via the Internet, causing one of the heaviest backbone traffic days in the history of the medium. But Friday's vote to release the tape will send far denser video data over the same massive network, and could reduce its speed to a crawl.
Even average Net surfers not viewing the video would experience major slowdowns, predicted Bill McCarty, program director for the IP Multicast Initiative, an industry consortium devoted to improving high-volume distribution of Internet data.
"The network will be so bogged down by all of these people accessing that [ video ] stream that everyone who uses and accesses the Internet will be affected," said McCarty.
All major news-broadcasting networks – including Fox, CNN, ABC, and National Public Radio – are gearing up to provide some or all of the video on the Web, allowing surfers around the world to watch Clinton testify about his affair with a comely White House intern.
Kerrin Roberts, spokesman for CNN Interactive, said once the videotape is released to the public, "we will be streaming it live and we will also have it on demand." He also said that "if [the release] happens during a business workday, then it's likely to be the biggest video story we've had on the Web."
Spokeswoman Michelle Bergman confirmed that ABCNews.com will follow suit. ABC, CNN, and others also plan to make highlights available in segmented form.
Many news providers are turning to the technology and network services of streaming-media pioneer RealNetworks, which provide up to 85 percent of the video content on the Web.
"[The television networks] are all users of our technology," said RealNetworks spokesman Jay Wompold. "But with the expected huge demand... they're going to be using the Real Broadcast Network to handle load beyond what they wouldn't be able to handle on their own."
RealNetworks also runs the Real Broadcast Network, a year-old joint venture with MCI that feeds video onto the Net using MCI's massive Internet backbone. Wompold said nearly all major networks are using the Real Broadcast Network and other media-streaming service providers, such as Broadcast.com, to supplement their own video servers.
The Real Broadcast Network relies on a structure that feeds single streams of popular video content to servers at the perimeter of the MCI backbone. Internet service providers then retrieve video content from these downstream locations, thereby distributing the load of video traffic around the Net.
The @Home cable-based Internet service provider says its network's high speeds and efficient infrastructure will result in a better viewing experience for its customers.
A whopping 5.9 million users reportedly flocked to sites across the Web last week to read the text of the Starr report.
Both ABCNews.com and CNN boasted record traffic in reaction to the Starr report. ABCNews.com reported a total of 1.4 million visitors on Friday, while CNN says its Web sites saw 27.7 million individual page "views" over the weekend, a 58 percent increase in average weekend traffic, CNN said.
Whether the infrastructure will survive the onslaught of eager surfers sucking high-bandwidth video over the Net, rather than low-bandwidth text, is debatable among experts. Even RealNetworks acknowledges that the medium is entering uncharted territory.
"Right now we'd just be guessing," said Mark Hall, who works on the team preparing the Real Broadcast Network for support of the news networks. "A lot of it depends on how the story unfolds – what kind of tapes are released and how. If the tapes go up in prime time, we're going to see a behavior pattern that's very different."
CNN's Roberts agreed. News events that break during working hours result in a much higher number of people watching CNN programming through the Net, he said. If it's off-hours, the TV in the living room gets a higher portion of the traffic.
While Bergman was confident ABCNews.com's plans to stream the video in its entirety would go fine, Martin Hall of the IP Multicast Initiative says the real problems would occur at the user's end of the line.
The standard T1 connection of an Internet service provider handles a maximum of 53 dialup connections pumping data to a user, he said, but a 54th user could cause a major problem.
Such major news events could drive home one point: that Internet needs better ways to deal with surges of users.
"This Clinton issue is a turning point in terms of people understanding how significant [the bandwidth problem] really is," Hall said.
The House Judiciary Committee is expected to release the videotape and close to 3,000 pages of supporting text on Monday at 9 am EDT.
