‘LOTR’ preview sees 6.6 million downloads in first week
by Dennis Sellers, dsellers@maccentral.com
April 20, 2000, 7:00 am ET

New Line Cinema’s “The Lord of the Rings” preview footage has had a record-breaking one-week total of over 6.6 million downloads since it became available on April 7. However, not all QuickTime fans are happy with the trailer/footage.

The trailer loads in a proprietary box with no means of saving it to your hard drive. Immediately following this discovery, some Mac fans mobilized into action on the QuickTime message boards and newsgroups, sharing methods of ferreting out the movie so they could save it and view it whenever they wished. (MacCentral isn’t advocating this, just reporting that it happened so don’t flame me.)

Available exclusively in Apple’s QuickTime format, the delivery of the preview was handled by the FreeFlow SM Streaming service of Akamai Technologies. During the preview’s first week of availability, Akamai’s global network served 8.45 terabytes of data. At the peak, Akamai’s network supported 450MB of data per second.

“Without Akamai’s over 2,700 servers, we would not have been able to satisfy the overwhelming demand to see this behind-the-scenes footage of The Lord of the Rings,” said Joe Nimziki, president of New Line Marketing, in a press release. “We are grateful that Akamai marshaled the technical resources necessary to help us pull off this record-breaking marketing coup.”

To view the Lord of the Rings movie preview, you’ll need QuickTime 4.0. If you have it, just cruise on over to http://www.apple.com/trailers or http://www.lordoftherings.net.

Akamai’s FreeFlow Streaming service, delivered from the Akamai EdgeAdvantage platform, exceeds user expectations by delivering high-quality and reliable streaming media content including live events, continuous broadcasts and on-demand media, according to Dan Fraisl, vice president and general manager of streaming, Akamai. Akamai’s EdgeAdvantage technology delivers content by intelligently routing requests across its distributed global network to the optimal server for each site visitor, he adds. EdgeAdvantage evaluates real-time Internet conditions, thus eliminating problems caused by server overloads and network bottlenecks, says Fraisl.

New Line anticipates releasing the first installment of the trilogy of movies for “The Lord of the Rings” during the Christmas holiday season of 2001. So you’ve got plenty of time to read J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy before the film opens.

This I would LOVE (and my birthday is July 18th….mark it down) Check this sword out, available on Ebay. Go and bid! [More]

Another “Lord of the Rings” question makes it to Who wants to be a Millionaire.

What piece of jewelry did the literary character Frodo Baggins use to become invisible?

A. brooch
B. necklace
C. ring
D. crown

The person got it right by use of a ‘Phone a friend’.

Thanks to Randy and all the rest who sent the news in!

You can catch Liv Tyler (Arwen) in ‘Armageddon’ on TMN [More]

You can see Viggo Mortensen (Aragorn) in ‘Psycho’ on TMN [More]

Aussie Ringers can also catch Ian Holm (Bilbo) in ‘Loch Ness’ on Saturday.

Hello again Tolkienites! Sorry about the delay, but poor old Gamgee has been putting in some long hours in the garden as of late, as hadnt been able to get to his duties of entertaining the masses. Our last winner was Shayne Parkinson, way to go Shayne!! The answers were:
1. Sarn Gebir
2. Emeldir
3. Theoden
Here are the questions for today:
1. “Name the waterfalls on the Sirannon.”
2. “iemalgn” (scrambled Tolkien person, place or thing)
3. “Yes, yes, and Sam stinks!” (Who said this?)
As always, Mail me with your answers, the 1st person to send all 3 correct answers in 1 mailing, will be posted here tomorrow! Good Luck………..Gamgee

This evening at 6PM EDT marked the begining of ImagineCon. Calisuri, Blasm, and myself spent the day making our final preparations for our ‘fan table’ at the front of the Pavillion Convention Center in Virginia Beach, Virginia. Having arrived late last night, due to a variety of transportation mishaps, we got a late start.

ImagineCon is a Sci-Fi/Fantasy/Horror convention hosting a wide variety of featured speakers and guests. You can find out more about ImagineCon at their website. ImageineCon will last until Sunday Apr 23rd, we hope if it is possible that you stop by and say “Hello”.

Starting at 6PM we started showing the Internet Preview to fans of all sorts. Many surprisingly did not realize that LOTR was being made into a set of films, but we educated them. The interest in the project, us, and Tolkien in general warmed our hearts and increased our panic over the presentations we have to make over the following two days. Many wonderful people stopped by to chat for a while including Shecky, Bill the Fox,Rosemary’s Baby, and Dehvyn.

Mike TeaVee (Paris Themmen in real life) of Willy Wonka fame stopped by our table to have an exclusive preview of Saturday’s presentation. It turns out he will be signing autographs then.

Hopefully in the morning the rest of our stuff will arrive courtesy of FedEx and we can truely spread the word about the films. We will be checking back in the following two nights to give you further reports from ImagineCon. You can take a peak at the action in the following photo’s.



The Pavilion Conventio Center – Setup Day


The Big Box of Squishy Balls


Crowding around TheOneRing.net Table


Crowd at Table. Shecky, Bill the Fox, Rogue and others viewing the trailer


Calisuri and Corvar- Wonder Twin power activate


ImagineCon’s Dehvyn – Security Guy and Proud owner of a Stress Ball