2011 Nobel Conference Streaming Statistics

You may have known that Nobel Conference 47 drew thousands of people to Gustavus this week, but you probably didn’t know that there were also a lot of people watching the event live online.

The graph to the right shows the number of concurrent video streams we were serving from our live streaming system.  The peak of about 600 occurred during the second lecture on the first day by Vilayanur Ramachandran.  An interesting side note is that Vilayanur was himself being streamed via video conferencing to give his presentation and participate in the Q&A session.

The top graph shows the connections we had on Tuesday, the first day of the conference.  The second graph is Wednesday, and the third is both days in one image so you can compare the relative numbers for each day.

What the graphs don’t show you though, is how many people were tuned in and watching.  Each connection is a computer streaming the event.  Presumably there is a person watching it but in some cases that one computer is feeding an entire auditorium of people.

You can clearly see each lecture followed by a quick decline before the Q&A sessions where the decline slowed a bit and then sharply fell off again once the Q&A was over.  The colors represent a combination of which streaming server is being used, if the connection is high or low bandwidth, and if the user is on or off campus.

Finally, here are a few more interesting bits of information:

• Traffic from our streaming servers reached about 1.2Gigabit/s with around 400Mbit/s out to the internet.
• Evening lectures had a fairly high number of viewers compared to previous years.
• There were a total of 3754 unique IP addresses that loaded the flash video player and watched at least some of the conference.