A week before Silence in the Hub's contest, Tom Gardner contacted the Williams Office of Information Technology (OIT), to ask for help making the WCFM stream work better on Trivia Night. Tom corresponded with Peter Charbonneau, who made changes to the way WCFM is streamed. He describes the changes he made like this:

I created a "Trivia" channel in our bandwidth shaper that allocated (allocates) 7Mbps of bandwidth for the host(s) specified in the configuration. I had specified two hosts ... the current streaming host named WCFM5 and a second host (which has since been removed) as a potential backup if the first one failed for some reason. We performed some testing a few days in advance, which I would always recommend, so that we could make changes if necessary -- no changes were needed.

Tom recalls:

I will say they were extremely responsive. Hard to believe years have passed with this streaming issue and I never thought to simply ask Williams IT...me, who would call my own company's Help Desk 50 times a year! All I did, since I am a non-techie too, was describe the problem quite simply. I said we had 50-100 people trying to stream the contest, and it was clearly overloading as it was worst at the beginning of the contest and got better (though never perfect) after the early teams dropped out. Pete took it from there... quickly, I might add.

A successful test was run on Tuesday night, 5/12/09. People on the Trivia mailing list were asked to all listen to the stream at 9:00, and the result was a resounding success—no one experienced any problems at all.

The same was true on Trivia Night. After years of painful buffering, dropping, and restarting, it was a great joy to all off-campus teams to be able to listen to the contest all the way through without messing with the stream at all. Kudos to Tom and Pete!

The technical issues that did manifest had to do with the website. Silence in the Hub opted to use a "Google Sites" location, and were the first team in several years not to use Kate Krolicki's Trivia software on the back end. At about 1AM players were greeted with a message saying that the site had exceeded its bandwidth, and everyone was locked out.

Silence quickly set up another site, and took care thereafter to put boni on separate sites to avoid using too much bandwidth. So it wasn't the disaster it might have been, and the only real casualty was the 3AM Hour Bonus, which was lost in the shuffle and declared MIA.