Topic

Live Streaming

Every two seconds, a new video segment has to be encoded, packaged, and delivered to millions of people simultaneously — with no pause button and no second take. These case studies cover the infrastructure built under live events that broke records, and the engineering decisions made under real-time pressure when there was no room to fail.

Hotstar Live Streaming
★ 5.0
18 min

When MS Dhoni Got Out: How Hotstar Survived 25 Million Concurrent Users

July 9th, 2019. India vs New Zealand, Cricket World Cup semi-final. MS Dhoni walks to the crease and 1.1 million new viewers join Hotstar every single minute. Then he gets run out — and 24 million people hit the back button almost simultaneously.

25.3M peak concurrent 1.1M users/min growth 5.7 Tbps bandwidth +3 1M requests/sec 108,000 CPU test rig <90s scale reaction
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Netflix Live Streaming
18 min

65 Million Streams: How Netflix Rebuilt Its Guts for Live

November 15, 2024: 65 million people log on to watch Mike Tyson fight Jake Paul, the largest live sports stream in history. Behind the scenes, Netflix engineers are white-knuckling a system they built from scratch — one where a single bad video segment, a CDN request storm, or a missed 2-second write deadline means millions of viewers see a black screen.

65M concurrent streams 113ms → 25ms p50 latency 200Gbps+ read throughput +3 2-second segment SLA 90%+ cache hit on 404 storms 38M events/sec monitored
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