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India's Hotstar Sets New Benchmark With Streaming Record, Draws Over 10M Concurrent Viewers To a Cricket Match (medium.com) 59

Posted by msmash from the setting-new-records dept.
An anonymous reader shares a report: An Indian on-demand streaming service, with fewer than 400 employees, has pulled off a milestone that Silicon Valley companies Facebook, Amazon and Google-owned YouTube can only dream about at the moment. On several occasions Sunday evening, more than 10 million viewers simultaneously tuned in to Hotstar, the largest on-demand streaming service in India, to watch the deciding match of the 11th edition of Indian Premier League cricket tournament. The real-time concurrent views, displayed publicly on Hotstar's website, peaked at 10.7 million, the highest any online streaming service has reported to date. It's a big milestone for Star India-owned Hotstar, which first broke the previous top record -- about 8 million concurrent views -- in the first qualifier match in the same cricket tournament last week. In 2012, YouTube reported that its platform saw about 8 million concurrent views on the live-stream of skydiver Felix Baumgartner jumping from near-space to the Earth's surface.
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India's Hotstar Sets New Benchmark With Streaming Record, Draws Over 10M Concurrent Viewers To a Cricket Match More

India's Hotstar Sets New Benchmark With Streaming Record, Draws Over 10M Concurrent Viewers To a Cricket Match

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  • Yeah, lame I know, but it's a holiday and my coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

  • Still a marginal result (Score:5, Informative)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Monday May 28, 2018 @09:50AM (#56688030)
    Most viewed TV shows in the world scored about 1 billion of viewers [wikipedia.org], i.e. 100 times more than this. Furthermore, none of them could be traced through an IP address.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Fair point. But what makes this Indian company's milestone impressive is the concurrent viewers it drew. YouTube's highest is at about 8 million -- and that too it set in 2012. Since then the company has struggled to grow past 5 million mark. YouTube is also very much free, Hotstar is not. You would have had to subscribe to a paid plan to be able to watch that cricket match.

      • Fair point. But what makes this Indian company's milestone impressive is the concurrent viewers it drew.

        Also the minor detail that this is Internet streaming, not radio broadcasting. Broadcasting radio waves to a lot of people isn't very difficult.

        I know, little details like that are easy to miss...

    • I assume that the point is the technical feat of being able to stream to that many people simultaneously, not that a lot of people watch cricket matches in India.

    • I'm puzzled how they do this efficiently. I'm assuming they are sending the streams to each user individually. thus 10M separate transmissions of every frame must me sent.

      Am I wrong?

      Do people now multicast? And will we ever have something like an edge network of torrent casting?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        The article only says they used a CDN (and therefore presumably multiple servers), but some things can be plausibly inferred about how any single server handles connections.

        Apparently they offer their streaming service as a website, so presumably they use standard web streaming protocols. TCP-based protocols don't allow multicast [stackexchange.com]. WebRTC [wikipedia.org] precludes the use of multicast [stackoverflow.com], but allows the use of peer-to-peer connections [mozilla.org].

        Therefore we can reasonably infer that it's probably P2P and not multicast, unless you're rig

      • I'm puzzled how they do this efficiently. I'm assuming they are sending the streams to each user individually. thus 10M separate transmissions of every frame must me sent.

        Am I wrong?

        No, but it's not 10 million connections to a single server.

        When you connect to the main server you''l be transparently redirected to a local mirror server.

        From the local mirror there will be a combination of Multicasting, Anycasting, and direct connections, depending on your local routers.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jma05 ( 897351 )

      Yes, but that was a TV broadcast, not concurrent streaming.
      This is an entirely different scaling challenge.

      • Yes, but that was a TV broadcast, not concurrent streaming. This is an entirely different scaling challenge.

        It's also idiotic and backwards, especially given that IP networks are capable of multicast/broadcast but those features are never used. Instead, it is considered a great success when a company can send a bazillion identical copies on separate streams.

        It is doubly idiotic when done over cell networks -- remember when radio telephony was mainly used in emergencies at remote locations? Radio broadcast stations don't choke if there's a metric shitload of listeners in a small area.

        Add to this media compani

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I was reading through the list for the UK and saw:

      Miss World 1967 - Peru wins

      FFS, I'd been looking forward to watching that but they've spoiled it by telling me who wins!

    • IPL season always full of enjoyment. No matter which teams are playing, but the Match is important to everyone.

  • Pro tip: multicast capable CDN on one end and anycast IPs on another

  • easily done in 90's tech (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    10 million viewers would be no problem for multicast (perhaps ipv6 now makes this easier).
    At the time, licensing concerns was a roadblock for multicast.
    Less efficient, but still possible, would be to use P2P. Each viewers stream may be slightly less live than multicast, but it should eventually scale to infinite. Licensing still a concern.
    At the bottom of the list, unicast, is the current "state of the art". load balancers on load balancers on thousands of machines,vps,containers, with each client having

    • Nah, that was state of the art 10+ years ago.

      The current state of the art is adaptive bitrate streaming (video delivered in chunked files, typically over HTTP, e.g. DASH or HLS). In terms of efficiency it's still nowhere near as good as multicast of course, but it's nowhere near as bad as the older Flash or Real streaming with a direction connection to the server.

      It has numerous disadvantages, but on the plus side it leverages the near ubiquitous reach of HTTP along with its pretty mature supporting infrast

  • CCTV Spring Festival Gala Live Stream [variety.com]

    iQIYI, one of the online platforms carrying the show, said that simultaneous views of the Gala reached a record 14 million, surpassing the company's previous record set during the 2014 soccer World Cup.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Sure it reached 14 million people/users, but how many of them actually watched it simultaneously?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I agree. The semantics is important here. Saying simultaneous views reached XYZ million is different from saying XYZ million viewers actually watched it concurrently.

  • Sounds like a completely fabricated scenario. I'm looking forward to some form of actual corroboration.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by msmash ( 4491995 ) Works for Slashdot
      Akamai seems to corroborate the 8-million figure [akamai.com], which Hotstar reached on Tuesday. (They reached the 10-million figure on Sunday.)

  • Some day, analog long range multicast technology will allow live video to be broadcast to an _unlimited_ number of devices without any additional load on the server.

    This may even happen wirelessly.

    Will we see the day? Who knows ...

    Here's the patent by Philo T. Farnsworth:

    https://patentimages.storage.g... [googleapis.com]

  • Indian sub continent and its diaspora are avid fans of the game. Especially after it shed its "play for five days, with a rest day in between, and end in a draw" format of Test Cricket and came up with a jazzy 20-20 format. Just 120 balls (or pitches in baseball parlance) Ties are very rare, always exciting, even one sided games generate some hope for the losing teams at odd moments, the whole match is over in less than four hours...

    They are spread all over the world, a lot in Japan, Europe and USA but

    • Neh, it's still boring.
      • All balls are full tosses... and home runs are so rare and the whole team scores runs in single digits ... And you talk about Cricket?

        Yeah, the game you call Baseball is played by girls and children in Cricket playing countries, called Rounders.

    • Nobody has shed test cricket, well, nobody who matters anyway. It will always be the ultimate form of the game.
      A bunch of blokes playing hit and giggle is just a circus, with the supporters the clowns.

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