Kai Mook
On Sunday May 17th 2009, more than 30,000 concurrent online viewers, some as far away as New Zealand, Aruba and Argentina, witnessed the birth of Kai Mook, the first-ever elephant born at the Antwerp Zoo.
In the course of the weekend, more than 350,000 viewers enjoyed a front row seat, with an average viewing time of 1 hour and 35 minutes.
Since elephant births are notoriously unpredictable, a Rambla Broadcaster was set up at the Zoo months in advance. During this period, the broadcast was tested at regular intervals by Rambla engineers, who also kept monitoring the live-stream throughout the final weekend, adding bandwidth capacity when needed. After the birth, clips of Kai Mook's first steps were immediately transcoded and published to the Rambla CDN for on-demand viewing.
The huge success of this Web 2.0 campaign by ad agency Boondoggle has proven that scalability and reliability are key issues when streaming a live event. The Rambla CDN allowed the Antwerp Zoo to handle such peak traffic conditions in an efficient and cost-effective way.
