The CEO wanted everyone in the company to view a 5 minute video. I signed up for a corporate account with Vimeo and hosted the video there. We sent out a global email with the link at 9:30 this morning. By 9:45, we received a dozen complaints of stuttering video, slow loads and failed loads. Vimeo performed fine, but everyone going through the corporate proxy had a problem. We have a 50Mb pipe from the ISP and 1200 employees at the corporate office plus 500 more worldwide.
How would you have handled this differently given our infrastructure?
I'm looking for practical answers, not just technical solutions. In the future, should we announce to small groups at different times? Host the video internally for the corporate office? Open to all suggestions.
Assuming you have a 50MB symmetrical link with your ISP, if you host the video internally you'll save the Internet traffic for your internal 1200 users (download), while having to send it out to the 500 worldwide users (upload). That's a net balance of 700 * (video size) less traffic, so hosting it internally is definitely something you should look into.
Check your proxy settings. Checkt the max. size of files that are getting cached by your proxy. If the file is getting served by the proxy for the internal users and the rest by the content provider you should be fine. For internal hosting on your own "video server" mailq´s comment is worth thinking about it.