We looked at the numbers yesterday for the people streaming coverage of the Obama inauguration to their computers, but how smoothly did that experience really go for everyone? Despite anticipating the record number of users trying to view the streams, providers were unable to keep up with the demand, leaving some with slow, jerky video or without coverage altogether.

Some accounts blamed the issue on low-speed connections to residential areas rather than server issues or network problems further up the chain, but that doesn't sound right to us. If you can normally watch YouTube or Hulu clips without a hitch, there should have been no reason for problems to pop up this time. That would only account for poor quality connections, anyway, not the trouble CNN visitors ran into, where the site had to pull access to its feed for some, redirecting them to "waiting rooms" until demand to the streams decreased.

The problem at the heart of this, and one that has plagued digital content distribution since day one, is that the internet doesn't make a good broadcast medium. While TV transmissions can reach an audience whose size is independent of the broadcast strength, internet video bandwidth scales directly with increased viewer numbers.

One option is for the big players to provide local ISPs with direct access to their media libraries, who then serve it out to their customers, keeping most of traffic off the internet's backbone. Another is using peer-to-peer technology, but even that's limited. Because upload speeds for many Americans are a mere fraction of download speeds, it's impossible to upload video to other users as fast as you can download it.

Frankly, we're not sure how to best address the problem, short of beefing up total network capacity to the level that countries like South Korea have reached, throwing bandwidth at the issue until it fades away. That may not be the most cost-effective solution but hey, we can dream, can't we?

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