I was having lunch with a friend of mine today. He brought up “The Tiger Effect” that had happened during the U.S.Open. Specifically he asked what is going to happen to service providers in a few weeks when the Beijing 2008 Olympics commences? If the U.S. Open was able to cause a noticable effect, then theoretically the Olympics would be worse.

I think there are many factors that will affect the network response and what service providers will be faced with when people are viewing the Olympics online. Design of the networks used by the Olympics, deployment of the Internet feeds, scaling of the servers, application choices to deliver the content, how everything is configured and many other factors. With the U.S. Open it all culminated to the one event at a specific time. This could happen with the Olympics, but it might be seen as more of a constant increase in streaming protocols and HTTP as there are many events simultaneously. Of course the finals for each event could have similar characteristics to the U.S. Open along with the opening and closing ceremonies, potentially with many more viewers. What I wonder is if any service providers are proactively preparing for this possibility? I guess we will see.

It looks like “The Tiger Effect” had an ‘effect’ on the stock price of Nike as well.