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