Hey, did you listen to the Oprah/ Eckhart Tolle "A New Earth" podcast that’s been going on for the past ten weeks? If you didn’t happen to hear about it, Oprah is doing this huge "global event" webcast, where everyone Skypes in and talks to her and her guest, and people from all over the world are watching it, the whole thing. I think it’s awesome that Oprah is trying to make the world a better place, so this post isn’t even about that. And, if you’re interested in the course, you can download it for free in iTunes, or find out more about it on Oprah.com.
It’s super cool that the whole effort has been so successful– I bet just the desire to talk to Oprah got alot of people over the hump with the Skype technology, which actually is pretty labor-intensive. Of course, I downloaded it as a series of audio podcasts, each of which ended up being so huge (average 80MB) that they kept causing my 80 GB iPod to skip, so instead I listened to them on my computer. Just because I am a closet tech nerd, though, I wanted to know how big the VIDEO versions of these files were. Turns out they’re about 1 gig apiece, and every week, Oprah is like "the podcast has been downloaded 1.7 million times since last week." Um, 1.7 million 1 GB downloads is literally a number of bytes so large they don’t even have a number for it, dude.
Yeah– not only is that an impressively large amount of people that are learning about podcasts– that’s also a mind-boggling amount of server space used per week. Can you imagine being on Oprah’s tech team? Better yet, can you imagine what the server farm that supports Oprah.com must look like? YOWZA! She must have, like, the entire state of Arizona filled with servers to support an enterprise this big. OK, maybe because of Moore’s Law she now only needs the state of Delaware, but you see what I’m saying. I heard that during the first live podcast, so many people logged on that the whole thing crashed, and I know this is true because Oprah MENTIONED IT in the next one. So– no pressure there. I think this is probably a double-edged sword– Oprah obviously has vision, and is willing to really push the envelope in terms of what can be done. I’m just saying I don’t know if I’d want to be the one in the tech department when Oprah runs back there and is like "What’s going on with my live webcast??" There’s no way you can put her off, like "Um– did you try rebooting?"