Yahoo!'s secret

Trying to erase the memory of what some consider the biggest failure in streaming media to date, Yahoo! and Victoria's Secret will team again for a live webcast of the lingerie maker's fashion show from the Cannes Film Festival in France.

Yahoo! learned its lesson from last year, when 1 million viewers tried to log onto www.victoriassecret.com within an hour following a commercial for the event. Only 2% were successful, according to reports. This year, Yahoo! plans to enter the second round prepared.

Yahoo! is unclear about what caused last year's problems. "It could have been limitations on bandwidth or it could be there were challenges just about every place, and that's difficult," said Brokaw Price, Yahoo!'s director of business development for multicast and broadband distribution.

But with this year's event, "we've had more time to plan and to go through just about every detail, regardless of however minute it might be," he said.

One of the biggest differences will be Yahoo!'s addition of IP multicasting technology for content distribution, as opposed to the strictly unicast approach used last year.

Unicast requires one stream for each person accessing the broadcast, but with multicasting, Yahoo! can deliver one video stream to a destination network where it is replicated, allowing an infinite number of people to receive the broadcast.

To achieve this, Yahoo! has teamed with 65 ISPs in cities across the country. "We think of them in pragmatic terms as affiliates," Price said. "I can deliver a stream, like ABC would to an affiliate, and then it goes to the customer base."

Broadwing is one of those partners. "If you had a million end users that were watching, you wouldn't want to send that same stream to a million different people at the same time," said John Stritzinger, director of advanced services for Broadwing.

Broadwing brings in a DS-3 peering connection to Yahoo!, enabling multicasting between the two companies' routers. "They are going to be broadcasting the event across our IP backbone, and we'll have to enable customers that want to participate," Stritzinger said.

The service provider foresees no significant impact on its OC-48 backbone from the one-way multicast streams that it will handle for the fashion show, Stritzinger said. "It's a very popular show, obviously, and we don't want to make any false claims," he said, but Yahoo!'s capabilities will be "significantly improved" through the multicasting arrangements.

Yahoo! also has added peering relationships with Internet backbone providers to increase the capacity, scalability and cost-effectiveness of the streaming distribution network. In addition, it has secured several extra servers for the show and increased its technological options, allowing viewer access via media players from Windows or RealPlayer. Last year, viewers could only access the event via RealPlayer.

In essence, Yahoo! has gained more "horsepower," Price said. "On the distribution side of the network, we've grown dramatically since the Webcast last year.We have a lot more available bandwidth."

Yahoo! also will host some added features during the show, including Yahoo! Chat, which will let fans interact live with one of the Victoria's Secret models, and Yahoo! Auctions, which will feature a round-trip jaunt to Cannes to attend the live fashion show.

Viewers also can purchase the items they see via Yahoo! Shopping, making the event an interactive experience, Price said. "The client wants to leverage the technologies available today to the fullest extent possible," he added. "All the tools are truly going to enhance the consumer experience."

If Yahoo! can pull off the show, it will be good for the company's client base. "It helps us prove that our network scales," Price said. "We have a platform that any and all companies can embrace and use to distribute content to a large consumer base."