Justin Hourigan's Blog

Oscar nominated The Secret of Kells at HEAnet conference

Feb 02

Oscar nominated The Secret of Kells

The producer of Oscar nominated The Secret of Kells, Paul Young CEO of Cartoon Saloon, gave a talk at HEAnet conference in 2009 about their studio.

Tags: Work

Top 10 quirky science tricks for Christmas parties

Dec 13

houriganScience Multimedia, Science No Comments

Top 10 quirky science tricks for Christmas parties

Tags: Multimedia, Science

Budget webcast

Dec 10

houriganMultimedia, Technology, Work Streaming, Work No Comments

Budget 2010 Bandwidth Graph

The Budget webcast on Wednesday the 9th of December wasn’t has big as the emergency budget in April but still very busy. We had about 9100 concurrent streams at peak using 4.49 Gbit/s of bandwidth. The format ratio was 8:1 to Flash over Windows Media.

Some more stats from the webcast;
Average viewing time: 5 minutes, 1 second
79% of viewers were in Ireland.
76% of Irish viewers were viewing in Dublin.

Traffic Sources;
irishtimes.com
newstalk.ie
boards.ie
independent.ie
heanet.ie
finfacts.ie
oireachtas.ie
businessandfinance.ie
smallbusinesscan.com
breakingnews.ie
dublins98.ie
fiannafail.ie
businessandfinancetoday.com
tcd.ie
publicaffairsireland.com
irishexaminer.com
thepost.ie
herald.ie
examiner.ie
ilta.net
irishexaminer.ie
tv-here.ru
epa.ie
sbpost.ie
ucd.ie

The technology behind it;
We use 6 Dell PowerEdge 1950 servers with Windows Server 2003 and Flash Media Server 3.5, each connected with two gigabit connections to the HEAnet network. The Windows Media servers (soon to include the FMS servers) are Dell PowerEdge R905 servers with 10 Gbit/s connections running Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V. The servers currently host four virtual machines serving Windows Media using network load balancing across the VMs. They will soon host FMS VM also.

Tags: Streaming, Work