This weekend I was reminded again of just how amazing this Internet we’ve all built together really is! There I was at 6:00am in my house in Vermont … drinking my cup of tea and watching my wife and her team compete in dragon boat races some 3,700 miles (~ 6,000 km) away in France. I could see them paddling hard in their boats. I watched multiple boats capsize! (Thankfully not hers.) I was caught up in the drama and just watching all these many boats full of breast cancer survivors competing against each other.[1]
It’s 2026 and for much of the 75% of the world who has Internet connectivity, we’ve gotten used to live streams. They’re pretty much everywhere! Most social media sites support live streams. YouTube of course does. Twitch is built around livestreaming. There are zillions of shopping services doing live streams of products. Many of the video streaming services support live sessions. And even people who still watch the regular old TV have gotten used to news programs having people streaming in from all over the world.
But when I found myself frustrated with the lack of audio as they had some technical difficulties[2], I could feel my blood pressure rising. And as I joined in on comments on the event’s Facebook page noting that the audio wasn’t working… I found myself pausing.
Wait… I said to myself… isn’t it amazing that this actually works as well as it does??
I mean… the people doing the streaming were taking a live video feed from a DRONE following the boats on a lake in France, doing some kind of local mixing to put on the titles, lower-thirds, etc., and then sending that off to YouTube. The stream probably hit local YouTube servers in France where it was then sent across YouTube’s streaming infrastructure.
In my case that meant the stream went across some subsea cable to presumably some data center in the US where it would then go out across YouTube’s CDN until it eventually crossed Burlington Telecom’s network to land in my house, where it actually had one final step to go across WiFi to my laptop where i was watching. (And yes, I’m simplifying as there were many other pieces and networks involved.)
And all this happened… within fractions of a second 🤯!
Or maybe it was a second or two… I don’t actually know or care. The point is that I was watching these live races from across an ocean. And other family members were watching from other parts of the USA.
And teams participating in the event were from much farther away… for instance from Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore. And given that there were 4,500 paddlers total, I’m sure some number of supporters were watching from there. The New Zealanders were very literally on the opposite side of the world!
And… … it worked! [3]
In places like where I live where we have strong, solid Internet access (and also solid electricity), it’s so easy to just take all this for granted. Of course it will work! We just assume that the Internet will be all around us, just like air. And… most of the time… we’re right!
But sometimes we need to just pause and reflect for a moment… and step back in our minds 30 or 40 years .. and think how MAGICAL this would all seem to someone from that era!
We live in an amazing time!
[1] And admittedly being completely caught up in the amazing drone footage! In my loooonng list of things I want to play with is to use drones for livestreaming…
[2] I know a guy in Brooklyn, New York, who does amazing live streaming and would never have let a live stream go live like this without audio! 😃
[3] With the exception of not having audio for a period of time, but they did get the audio back working again.
Image credit: A screenshot I took of the IBCPC live stream.