C’mon- how often do you get to enmesh one of your most favorite recording artists with your work passion? Literally never, until recently.
Many of you probably saw that a few nights ago Drake, Tyler “ninja” Blevins, JuJu Smith-Schuster( Pittsburgh Steeler) and Travis Scott (rap artist) played Battle Royal on Twitch. No big deal right? 628k concurrent viewers on the Twitch channel- nearly doubling the previous record. Many more views on VOD. Why is this significant? Don’t live streamed events have much larger unique streams? NBC’s 2018 Super bowl stream averaged 103.4 Million streams. The difference is that events have the luxury of pre-deployment of streaming infrastructure and dedicated NOCs ( network operations centers) that have contingencies in place ( like Peer2Peer overlays) to accommodate higher viewership requirements. Live streamed channels like Twitch have literally no advance notice when massive spikes occur when a mega celebrity decides join a gaming session. For most broadcasters and OTTs, these ludicrous stream peaks are not common, but as we see more video integration into news and social platforms, I think this will be much more the norm.
Time to invest and innovate in AI and ML for consistent and predictable stream quality.
