Streaming Hurricane Katrina

Yet, while streaming traffic among media properties surged, for the most part, streaming ad traffic did not. "Advertisers are our largest vertical and we’ve got most of the top ten, so if overall browsing activity to free and sponsored sites was up it would be reflected in both our totals and in our advertising vertical. That hasn’t been the case," says Buck.

There seems to be two primary reasons for that. Some national news broadcasters chose not to try and monetize their increases in streaming traffic as a matter of principle surrounding a disaster of Katrina’s magnitude. "In a situation like a catastrophe, ads are turned off," says McConville. "That comes back to an editorial (decision) as to whether they should run ads on it. Generally, if there’s something that’s a tragedy, they’re not going to run ads on it."

Alternatively, many smaller news sites simply didn’t have the ads to fill all of the available inventory due to the increase in streams served. "Advertising for us is a challenge to sell because of the differences in selling for TV and selling for the Web. Our sales force really hasn’t been entirely successful selling for the Web," says WHDH’s Nuernberg. "It’s not a question of having the technological aspects in place. We could start serving ads today; we’re just not selling them."

For smaller broadcasters like WHDH, this represents a significant problem during events like Katrina, as every stream served without advertising eats another chunk out of their monthly streaming budgets, eventually forcing them to make decisions about whether or not they can even afford to offer a stream or if they have to consider putting a cap on how many streams are served. "It can actually be a significant cost unless we are able to find a way to monetize these streams. When something like Katrina happens we have to be on the phone with Mirror Image trying to predict how this is going to happen as well as how much traffic we want them to handle for us," says Nuernberg. "Today if something big happens we have to try and limit how much we’re going to stream. Events that bring on a lot of traffic do highlight a need for a working business model for selling ads that can make these transmissions self-sufficient or profitable. Being that there’s quite a bit of cost associated with streaming over the Internet right now, if you can break even you’ll be at a good point."

No Such Thing as Bad Publicity
Like Live8 a few months ago, some in the industry are already touting this latest surge in streaming as evidence of another major signpost in streaming’s evolution. "This is clearly a spike that will hopefully expose more people to the ease with which they can get video on the Web. Getting people to sample it has been one of the challenges in getting more video streaming. It’s just been such a bad experience for so many years. Now it’s really come into its own in the last nine months," says Payne. "What an event like this does is give a broad range of people exposure to something that a lot of people haven’t tried in a long time."

Akamai’s Wheaton sees Katrina as unique both in the length of its impact and the way it has highlighted streaming’s usage patterns during the workday. "This has been a much different event because it’s been sustained. The Pope’s death and the Jackson trial were very short-duration events, very peaky. Now the unfolding news stories that you see on an ongoing basis have really captured people’s attention," he says. "And people have turned to the Web and streaming in particular during the workday as a prime way to get this information."

Additionally, comparing Katrina to last year’s hurricane in Florida highlights the changing nature of news providers’ approach to streaming media. "If you compare this with last year’s hurricane that hit Florida, few sites were prepared to stream hurricane coverage, whereas every media site we have is streaming coverage today."