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

Posted by msmash on 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.

59 comments

  1. Frist Psot! by andyring · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re:Frist Psot! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's clear, grandpa. Now take the pills :-)

    2. Re:Frist Psot! by andyring · · Score: 1

      Good advice. I'll go with the blue pill and go find my wife.

  2. Still a marginal result by LordHighExecutioner · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most viewed TV shows in the world scored about 1 billion of viewers, i.e. 100 times more than this. Furthermore, none of them could be traced through an IP address.

    1. Re:Still a marginal result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re: Still a marginal result by Zero__Kelvin · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
    3. Re:Still a marginal result by jma05 · · Score: 1

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

    4. Re:Still a marginal result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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!

    5. Re:Still a marginal result by Joce640k · · Score: 2

      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...

      --
      No sig today...
    6. Re: Still a marginal result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It was 10 mil projected watchers, not 10 mil individual streams.

    7. Re:Still a marginal result by TeknoHog · · Score: 2

      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 companies that want their subscribers to stream every time they want to listen/watch something, instead of keeping local copies. Well, at least it means faster/cheaper Internet for us dinosaurs.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    8. Re:Still a marginal result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most viewed TV shows in the world scored about 1 billion of viewers, i.e. 100 times more than this.

      And then you learn that's counting up aggregate broadcasts, not a singular point reception.

      So you're actually wrong, in that you're comparing the wrong data.

      Furthermore, none of them could be traced through an IP address.

      That's actually wrong too. The Sydney New Years coverage, for example, was streamed across the internet, and could have been traced.

    9. Re: Still a marginal result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      How does multicast work with authentication and DRM? Or Is business and making a profit idiotic and backwards too?

    10. Re: Still a marginal result by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Lol

    11. Re:Still a marginal result by ameypatilcom8584 · · Score: 1

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

    12. Re: Still a marginal result by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      How does multicast work with authentication and DRM? Or Is business and making a profit idiotic and backwards too?

      I think it's more like "hey, we can now track/control/charge for something that was freely broadcast in the past, so obviously we should do it". Most of the streaming I've come across is free as in beer, but I have a hunch that it's all watermarked to discourage further distribution, and they'll always have the option for stronger restrictions. For instance, a lot of our national TV programming is available for streaming for a limited time around the broadcast; of course, anyone can still record the broadcast and do what they like with it. It's weird that they first send out the program in unencrypted radio waves for everyone, and then expect to have any control over it. Naturally, copyright comes into play at some point, but if you're that worried about it, perhaps you shouldn't broadcast it around in the first place.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  3. Pro tip by fubarrr · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re: Pro tip by fubarrr · · Score: 1

      P.S. India loss to Pak in Champions Trophy was beyond even laughable...

  4. easily done in 90's tech by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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 an individual connection to a server instance. requiring and ever increasing bandwidth. Limited by computation availability and local and global network bandwidths. Worse solution, but every stream connection is tightly controlled, so the media companies are content.

    1. Re:easily done in 90's tech by dbrueck · · Score: 1

      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 infrastructure (worldwide CDNs).

  5. Re:People watch cricket? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    *crickets*

  6. Actual record by zioncat · · Score: 1
    CCTV Spring Festival Gala Live Stream

    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.

    1. Re:Actual record by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

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

    2. Re:Actual record by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

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

  7. Re:People watch cricket? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Same reason people in other places of the world watch football (or soccer, as some like to call it). Cricket is immensely popular in places like Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Asian markets.

  8. Re:People watch cricket? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I'm guessing you watch baseball instead. amirite?

  9. Multicasting or Torrent casting? by goombah99 · · Score: 1

    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?

    --
    Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    1. Re:Multicasting or Torrent casting? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      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. WebRTC precludes the use of multicast, but allows the use of peer-to-peer connections.

      Therefore we can reasonably infer that it's probably P2P and not multicast, unless you're right and they do simply use 10M connections.

    2. Re:Multicasting or Torrent casting? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      The article says they use Akamai.

      Akamai is no secret: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

      --
      No sig today...
    3. Re:Multicasting or Torrent casting? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

      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.

      --
      No sig today...
    4. Re: Multicasting or Torrent casting? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I can assure you it isn't ten million connections to a single server.

  10. Sounds like a lie by holophrastic · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re:Sounds like a lie by msmash · · Score: 2

      Akamai seems to corroborate the 8-million figure, which Hotstar reached on Tuesday. (They reached the 10-million figure on Sunday.)

    2. Re:Sounds like a lie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Sporting events routinely draw huge audiences.

      100 million people watch the Super Bowl, 1 billion people watch the World Cup Final (soccer).

      Why don't you believe that 10 million people (out of a potential audience of 1 billion Indians) could watch a big sporting event?

    3. Re:Sounds like a lie by holophrastic · · Score: 0

      That's not what I said. I'm not commenting on how many watched it at all. I'm commenting on how many were concurrently streamed. Rarely is anyone actually able to track that sort of thing. Buffering, proxies, flux, to-the-second, rounding errors. Remember how many of these sorts of statistics have been lies in the past decade alone.

      There's a very very old book (mid-twentieth-century) called "How to Lie with Statistics". It's not complicated.

      In this case, what's a viewer? What's a stream? What does concurrent mean?

      It's easy to make numbers say what you want them to say, especially when you don't define your units.

      In my mind, "concurrent" means within the same second. What if they mean within the same minute? Maybe you think it means within the same 100th of a second?

      In my mind, "stream" means the video being watched. Maybe they include the video being buffered? Or maybe it includes rewinds? What about repeated rewinds?

      In my mind, "viewer" means a computer. Maybe they mean a web browser (multiple windows open on the same screen). Maybe they mean a human being -- average humans per household sharing a single computer screen. Maybe they are including the family pets.

      None of this is to say that it isn't a valid record, or an impressive feat. How many humans (and dogs) that you can reach with a broadcast is a valid metric -- my dog likes to watch certain sports; sometimes I sit with him to watch something that he likes that I don't like. But that's a very different feat than the technological feat of serving that many different computers.

      And what if they send out one stream that gets proxied to a thousand households by a content delivery network. Whose record is that? What if it's a peer-to-peer delivery network?

      Who, what, where, when, why, how, which. This morning I traveled at a speed of 109. Meaningless without units, and how those units were measured. My GPS unit doesn't measure altitude, so when my car travels downhill, my GPS thinks I've slowed down.

    4. Re:Sounds like a lie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Well as they streamed I guess this means that there was a client at their end and that client said "Yep, I'm a user X, or uuid X, or a valid user"

      That'd kinda do it for you and give you accurate enough stats (like, pretty much spot on minus how many people staring at the screen), and be piss easy too do as well.

      You wrote a lot.

    5. Re:Sounds like a lie by holophrastic · · Score: 1

      You didn't read at all. So I'll write less.

      Two browser windows on one computer screen. Is that 1 viewer or 2 viewers?

      Two humans watching one computer screen. Is that 1 viewer or 2 viewers?

      One stream sent to Akamai, Akamai replicates that one stream in a 1'000 directions. Is that Hotstar or Akamai?

      Video streams get buffered. If my web browser requests six parts of the stream, concurrently, is that 1 concurrent viewer or 6 concurrent viewers?

      Here's one just for you. If everyone's anonymous -- same user X, same uuid X -- is that 1 viewer or many? Are you the same AC as before, or are you new?

      Read more.

    6. Re:Sounds like a lie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You missed the 'accurate enough stats' part of my reply to your reply that I fully read

      You still wrote a lot.

    7. Re:Sounds like a lie by msmash · · Score: 1

      All valid points. Thanks for taking the time out to outline them. (No sarcasm.)

    8. Re:Sounds like a lie by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We need more details on the sports your dog likes to watch and how influential the advertising is.

  11. Re:People watch cricket? by justthinkit · · Score: 1

    Much as I enjoy watching a bit of cricket, it is not telegenic.

    Wait til all those viewers in India discover pinball!

    --
    I come here for the love
  12. Re:People watch cricket? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Meh who cares it's all colored folk playing with their balls.

  13. Who cares about Indians by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's like caring about what the roaches are doing.

    1. Re:Who cares about Indians by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Small and petty American is small and petty. Go back to your basement, it's the only place where your opinion matter.

    2. Re: Who cares about Indians by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I would have no problem or remorse ending your existence

  14. Re:People watch cricket? by Joce640k · · Score: 1

    Also: Baseball, American football, or whatever other sport they put on TV that people obsess over.

    --
    No sig today...
  15. Re:People watch cricket? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No. Baseball is boring as fuck.

  16. Re:People watch cricket? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Because it's more interesting to watch than baseball, which is cricket for simpletons, due to there being so many variables involved.

    The condition of the pitch is different for every match and even varies throughout the match, which has an effect on the ball which itself also changes throughout the match as it wears which in turn has an effect on the way the bowler bowls it and even on which bowlers are used, which is also influenced by the current batsmen and their techniques and this all plays into deciding fielding positions.

    Cricket, especially test cricket, is like chess - a game of strategy and mind games.

    It's the second most popular sport in the world after soccer.

  17. Memo from the boss by Brockmire · · Score: 0

    We are predicting over ten million streams, please do the needful and make it happen.

  18. Re:People watch cricket? by Master+Moose · · Score: 1

    Cricket is almost recognised as an official religion in India.

    --
    . . .gone when the morning comes
  19. Disruption coming! by cowtamer · · Score: 1

    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...

  20. Re:People watch cricket? by q_e_t · · Score: 1

    Indeed. To me the story is "company manages to find 10m that want to stream cricket"

  21. Re:People watch cricket? by Jahta · · Score: 1

    Why?

    Because they enjoy it.

    It's pretty much the #1 sport in many Asian countries (like India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka), it's in the top 3 in countries like the UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (alongside soccer and rugby), and it's widely played in the Caribbean too.

  22. Not enough cricket broadcasting in big markets... by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1
    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 there is no regular TV channels broadcasting the matches. So there is no real alternative to streaming the match in. If the audience count spikes up enough, some sports channel of ESPN will broadcast it and then the streaming count will drop significantly.

    My brother is a big fan of the winner Chennai Super Kings, and I happened to catch the first innings. Extremely good, very watchable. American sports market is highly competitive, even hugely popular soccer is finding it hard to get a toe hold in this market. So I don't see this format of Cricket taking root in USA. But it would be very exciting if it did. Compared to low scoring Baseball, you get to watch 5 to 10 Sixers (homeruns) and 10 to 20 Boundaries ...

    Watch the 14 minute highlight reel, you can find it you tube. Very interesting and exciting. IPL should edit a version of the highlights reel for USA with commentary and explanation of strategy and tactics, it would be very nice.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  23. Re:Not enough cricket broadcasting in big markets. by johnsie · · Score: 1

    Neh, it's still boring.

  24. Re:Not enough cricket broadcasting in big markets. by Falconhell · · Score: 1

    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.

  25. Re:People watch cricket? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It could be worse, it could be soccer or golf.

  26. Re:Not enough cricket broadcasting in big markets. by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 1
    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.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact