How COVID-19 Changed Streaming Delivery Traffic Patterns
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Read the complete transcript of this clip:
Peter Chave: We saw about a 30% jump up. The other two things we saw that were fascinating, in terms of traffic patterns is, primetime seemed to flatten out. There wasn't an evening where people started streaming. It was just all day because, I may not be an essential worker, but for me to do my job, not having, Disney+ or Netflix, my children would just be running around, tearing the wallpaper off the walls or something.
So we've seen that of flattening of primetime. We've also seen the weekends disappear. It used to be where traffic patterns would kind of very secretly go up and down during the week. And then other weekends it would go down as people went to social events, do things that actually involve leaving the house. Now, people just sat in the house doing the same thing they'd do during the week. It's the weekends have gone and primetime has flattened out.
So one really cool anecdote, which we brought up in one of our meetings was, we were looking at the traffic patterns in Spain, particularly, and every evening there was this weird drop in all the traffic--exactly eight o'clock every night, day after day. And we're wondering, "Why is the traffic going away for three minutes?" It's because everyon is pausing, going outside, and clapping for the healthcare workers. But this was such a human thing to see in grafanas. We're all saying, "Why is this spike reoccurring?" We were looking for BGP router failovers. Networking people immediately go to try and solve a networking problem. But in reality it was just a very human manifestation.
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