Big Brother Live

Friday night the nation will be tuning into the first live broadcast of Big Brother, but will the servers be able to cope with interest in the Web site?

The site has been receiving 21,878,333 hits and around two million page impressions a day. With the servers running on more than 30 percent capacity Chris Short, content manager of the show, is amazed that it hasn't fallen over more.

"Our biggest challenge has been coping with the volume -- there was no television programme to follow the launch of the production for four days, so the site had to cope with phenomenal interest at the very start," he says.

With the first eviction happening Friday, tensions are rising not only in the Big Brother household, but also amongst the crew of the Web site. The site has set up an infrastructure that will allow it to take six million page impressions a day (based upon the five million page impressions that Germany's equivalent site peaked at). If the UK is able to produce more obsessive voyeurs than Germany, users may find themselves unable to view the first evictee walking the bridge of shame.

Real Networks -- which provides the video stream for the show -- are streaming a staggering one million video streams per day which peaked last Friday with 1.2 million video feeds.

Have you been watching Big Brother on the Web or on TV? Who do you think should stay and who should get the boot? Give Wendy McAuliffe your opinions.