Hundreds of the medical institution's employees watched the inaugural live, an unprecedented "stress test" of the infirmary's network, Harrison says. "Generally speaking, our baseline bandwidth is 7 megabits and we never see it go beyond a peak of 12 megabits."

To provide allocated bandwidth for the video streaming, the infirmary used its traffic-shaping equipment with Web site filtering, configuring it to reserve about half the bandwidth for medical applications usage, and the remainder for video streaming the inauguration for a few hours.

Using the traffic-shaping device, Harrison found news site-related video streaming can run from about 400-500 kilobits per PC up to as high as 800 kilobits per stream.

The IT department was prepared to quickly shut down the video streaming if it appeared it would disrupt operations, but that wasn't necessary.

With the inaugural event accomplished, the Cymphonix equipment will be put back into its more typical mode of allowing some measure of access to news sites, but without video streaming. The infirmary, which uses Cymphonix to set policy by computer and group usage, also disallows social-networking video-streaming, such as YouTube.