When the National Football League's New England Patriots and Indianapolis Colts take the field for their divisional playoff this weekend, fans of each team are likely to want to access team information or buy team mementos online.

This activity could cause sizable and geographically compact spikes in traffic at both teams' sites that will fade away until the next game for each team. After the season ends--barring arrests, doping revelations, or controversial player trades--spikes will become rare.

This is a far more exaggerated traffic pattern than those experienced by conventional retailers, who must gird mostly for major holidays. But even then, CIOs must decide if they're going to create permanent infrastructures that sit partially idle until a huge peak arrives. "You'd be crazy to build out for just the 10 days before Christmas," says Jeffrey Schutzman, VP of global sales and marketing for content-delivery firm Mirror Image Internet Inc.

The Patriots and Colts hired Mirror Image to provide what might be called rent-an-infrastructure. The company charges roughly 50 cents for each viewing of a high-resolution 10-minute video and $1 for every 10,000 pages served. Mirror Image guarantees 100% availability.

Mirror Image competes against many firms, including AT&T, Akamai Technologies, and Dow Jones.

Mirror Image has just partnered with Flash-media firm Macromedia so that Flash animations can be delivered over Mirror Image's infrastructure.

For the most part, content-delivery networks, as they are called, create national or international infrastructures capable of handling rushes so that pages open rapidly, applications don't crash, and rich media displays without hiccups.

In Mirror Image's case, the client creates the customer experience--the "special sauce," says Schutzman--everything from unique content to the back-office tasks, like collecting credit information, personalization, and so on.

The two NFL teams create dynamic content each game day, uploading it to Mirror Image. More static content, say a player's stats, also is created by each of the teams and uploaded to Mirror Image.

"Maybe the CBS sportscaster says they have an interview with a Patriots player online, and everyone logs on to see what nasty thing he said about Indianapolis," says Schutzman. A spike like that could overwhelm both a team's site and the local infrastructure.

With a content-delivery network, those requests don't go back to the client's server but instead get received and acted upon by systems in the content-delivery network. The network firm monitors and collects the information so it can be analyzed by the client.

Mirror Image also has gotten involved in the ultimate in spikey traffic. It has donated its network to handle online requests to view amateur videos of the tsunami and its aftermath. Links to the videos are being collected by the Media Bloggers Association, and requests to view a given video are fulfilled by Mirror Image.