The performance on an overburdened network might then lengthen response time on an important business transaction by a factor of 10, he said. For example, a person running a calculation over a spreadsheet might normally expect a 1-second delay for a response; network traffic could lengthen that delay to 10 seconds, Boyd said. At worst, there might be no response, something that could be troublesome when finalizing a stock trade, for example, he said.

In addition, office workers might be leaving themselves vulnerable to more viruses by clicking on something advertised as a video feed that is really somebody spoofing a network to do something nefarious, Boyd said.

CBS said it plans to cap the number of people who can tap into its video streams to keep the quality high. But that wouldn't necessarily alleviate potential network congestion on the receiving end -- which depends on the size of an office network, analysts said.

The controlling technologies involved are the routers and network 'pipes' into offices, such as T1 lines, said Matthias Machowinski, an analyst at Infonetics Research in Woburn, Mass. Machowinski said there are many ways to regulate such traffic, including Web site technologies that companies may already be using to block pornography or other objectionable material.

Network General and other companies sell monitoring products that can tell which workers are viewing certain kinds of software. And an entire retinue of smaller start-ups has developed software that sets priorities on certain traffic streams, opening network gates for all e-mail, for example, so that if a network is congested, lower-priority traffic such as video is delayed, he said.